This text is taken from our newsletter “Le Courier de l’économie” of March 25. Subscribe by clicking here.
No, there is no “VPN spring” in sight in Russia. Even if the sites that count the volume of downloads of mobile applications on the Android platform from Google as well as on the iPhone from Apple tend to indicate the opposite. The most popular apps in Russia these days are used to circumvent state-imposed internet censorship.
These applications provide access to a service called “VPN” (for “virtual private network” in the language of Canadian National, or “virtual private network” in French). These VPNs hide the content people are accessing from censors and can circumvent any state firewalls that, in Russia’s case, prevent access to Western media and a host of other sites and services, among other things. web.
VPNs are so opaque that even their providers don’t know what their users are viewing. That’s why we have to be very embarrassed before declaring that the sudden popularity of VPNs in Russia marks a flourishing interest of the Russian population towards information on the invasion of Ukraine which would come from external sources disapproved by Vladimir Poutine.
After all, Russian Internet users may as well use this anonymous tool for entertainment and visit TikTok, YouTube or even Netflix, why not. “It’s a hypothesis that seems quite plausible indeed,” notes the researcher in residence of the Observatory on multidimensional conflicts of the Raoul-Dandurand Chair at UQÀM Alexis Rapin. “We must moderate this view of a Russian population hungry for Western information. »
There are certainly Internet users in Russia who use a VPN service to consult foreign media and even to publish or share messages or videos themselves which illustrate the reality in a more direct way than what the media close to the President broadcast. Putin. But from there to hoping that this phenomenon alone will have an effect on public opinion sufficient to influence the course of the invasion in Ukraine, there is a step that we must be careful not to cross, adds Alexis Rapin.
In fact, it seems logical to believe that the Russian Internet users who consult the BBC’s daily publications (its Russian-language site saw its traffic triple during the first days of the conflict) were probably already opposed to the invasion of Ukraine before consulting the British media. Russians who are older or live far from big cities and have limited access to technology – and who may weigh more heavily in national public opinion – do not necessarily agree…
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