Twitter Helped Russia Censor Information About an Anti-Putin Protest

​On January 15th, thousands of Russians plan to protest in Moscow against the government's treatment of Russia's staunchest anti-Vladimir Putin activist. But you might not find out about it on Twitter.

Earlier today, ​several activists in Russia tweeted that they'd gotten emails from Twitter asking them to voluntarily remove tweets about the protest because they "violate Russian Federation laws." Most of the tweets I was able to view before they were eventually deleted ​appeared to link to this Facebook event advertising the January 15th protest, which is set to coincide with the sentencing of Alexei Navalny, a vocal anti-Putin critic who faces 10 years in jail ​on what many suspect is a trumped-up fraud charge.

"Dear User: We are informing you that we received a letter regarding your Twitter account. The letter states that some content in your account violates Russian Federation laws.

We ask that you immediately respond and advise whether you intend to voluntarily delete the designated content. This letter is not legal advice. You may consult a lawyer for qualified assistance with this question," the emails, sent by Twitter to people who tweeted out information about the protest, read.

I have even seen several reports that people who are merely joking about the protest received similar emails.

Twitter, for its part, says the emails are not takedown requests.

"We haven't removed anything," a Twitter spokesperson told me.

"Obviously they are not strictly takedowns, but what is the expected outcome when someone receives an email like this?" I asked him.

The company has not yet responded to that line of questioning.

In the first half of the year, Twitter says it received 32 requests from the government to remove content; the company says it complied with roughly 18 of those requests. This, however, appears to be a different brand of censorship, one that we reported on last month.

Rather than remove the tweet outright, Twitter merely sends a "notice" to the tweeter that the company has been contacted by the government. It links to specific objectionable tweets and asks the user whether or not he or she will remove it voluntarily.

Is it all that voluntary when you get a threatening-sounding email from the company that basically says your life will be easier if you just remove the content? In researching this article, many of the tweets referenced in Twitter's emails had been voluntarily removed, a move that helps the government achieve its goal of censoring content.

This comes after Facebook temporarily blocked the protest's event page at the behest of the Russian government. Following outrage at that move, a separate page was made that has not yet been blocked, and Andrew Bystrov, an organizer in Moscow who received one of the emails from Twitter, told me that the response appears to have caused Twitter to change course, too.

The RuNet, a Russian-language news site, notes that Twitter has "decided not to block tweets" mentioning the protest, and others are reporting that both Facebook and Twitter are "​prepared to be completely blocked" in Russia (one of the top tweets in the country today ​links to information about how to circumvent such a block). Meanwhile, interest in the protest has ballooned. In the last several hours, the number of RSVPed to the new Facebook event page has gone from 4,000 to 13,000.

"I received on a mail from Twitter Legal that in my account there was some content prohibited by Russian law. And they asked to remove such a content immediately as it violates anti extreme and information legislation," he told me. "But today situation has turned around. At least we hope so, as a new Facebook event isn't blocked and it is rumored that western social networks have decided not to block any events concerning the rally planned on January 15."