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Google and Apple removed jailed Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny’s tactical voting app from their app stores as Russians vote in parliamentary elections this month, according to Reuters. Allies of Navalny had planned to use the app to organize a tactical voting campaign that would deal a blow to United Russia, the country’s ruling party.
Last month, Russian President Putin accused United States’ tech companies of meddling in his nation’s elections and demanded they remove the app from their stores. Their compliance adds to the mounting evidence that diplomacy and foreign affairs is increasingly the domain of big tech firms, further upsetting the balance of power between the public sphere of governance and the “new governors” of the digital public sphere.
This is not the first instance of big tech’s defiance of US foreign policy objectives. Earlier this year, the New York Times published the findings of its multi-year investigation into Apple’s response to authoritarian Chinese censorship laws, having removed over 55,000 active apps from their App Store. This capitulation to Beijing comes despite the US Congress’s recently passed bill designed to explicitly counter China’s technological advantage.
Western tech firms had once used to be the poster child for the theory that the internet was an exception to the general need for government regulation. The consensus typically has been that as long as the government removed legal obstacles to the rapid growth of technology platforms, they could be trusted under the watchful eye of market forces, to innovate, scale, and generally improve people’s lives.
However, for private intermediaries like social media platforms, profit comes first. Companies first duty is to their shareholders, and they care about getting customers to consume as much of their product as possible, not about protecting human rights by ensuring freedom of speech. A history of self-censorship by tech firms in China, Russia, Turkey, and other authoritarian regimes suggests that if the easiest way to stay in business is to exclude content that foreign governments deem unsavoury, they are quite happy to do so. This explains why the social media companies often operate, as Daphne Keller puts it, in “anticipatory obedience” of the dictates of government regulators.
Apple and Google have done just that. The raft of new censorship measures from Moscow functionally outsources the dirty business of censoring foreign internets to computer engineers in Silicon Valley, London, and Brussels.
Big Tech’s regulatory exceptionalism must come to an end. Firms’ prioritization of profit has left Western governments without the tools to enact effective policy. Russia has made a territorial land grab into cyberspace, exerting its influence over Apple’s App store, and western governments have no levers to pull in response.
Instead, the West is left playing the diplomatic games of the last century. The latest intervention into Russia’s diplomatic sphere was a coordinated effort by the EU, US and UK to sanction Alexander Lukashenko’s regime in Belarus. Designed to punish the autocratic regime following the apparent kidnapping of journalists Roman Protasevich and Sofia Sapega, the effect of the sanctions has in fact been to drive Belarus closer to Russia.
Isolated from its neighbours in the EU, Belarus has pursued a policy of deepening ties with Russia through the ‘Union State’, joint military exercises, and Lukashenko’s increasingly hostile rhetoric towards the West. The West’s outdated diplomacy is not fit for the digital age, at best proving ineffective, at worst counter-constructive.
Sanctions will further squeeze Belarus’s battered civil society, which depends on social media to rally support. Civil society activists and particularly human rights defenders are denied access to the vast majority of Belarus media networks, which are now run by or under the influence of the government and its allies. In this atmosphere, social media—despite existing limitations—has been a critical tool for activists to draw global attention to abuses.
Indeed, Russia’s new restrictions come at a time when big tech firms are under closer scrutiny than ever. A year ago, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Google’s Sundar Pichai testified in front of a distrustful Senate committee. Lawmakers expressed concerns about tech companies’ power and overreach, as well as their potential influence on the US presidential elections scheduled just days after the hearing.
But Silicon Valley’s impact is not limited to the West. As Russia’s election has shown, social media platforms have hugely consequential roles around the world. Increased online censorship via Moscow will deprive Belarusian people of their only remaining source of reliable, nonpartisan news. Rather than doubling-down on economic sanctions in Belarus, Western governments must update their diplomatic box of tricks and refocus their strategic aims on ensuring the digital private sphere bolsters a unified foreign policy agenda.
We have seen Putin push Big Tech around in order to curtail democracy. How can Big Tech help the West to curtail Putin’s expansionist ambitions, in service of democracy?
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