Democracy Dies in Darkness

Opinion How Western tech companies are helping Russia censor the Internet

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December 21, 2021 at 2:33 p.m. EST
A man walks past an ad at an Internet devices shop in St. Petersburg in April 2019. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky)

Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan are co-authors of “The Red Web: The Struggle Between Russia’s Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries.”

In early December, Russian censors scored an unexpected success: Internet users all over the country reported that Tor, an encryption software that allows users to bypass online government controls, was going offline.