Roskomnadzor began throttling Twitter in Russia and threatened to block it

From 10 March, Roskomnadzor began throttling Twitter’s speed in Russia due to the social network’s refusal to remove content that the agency deemed illegal.

According to statement, since 2017 Roskomnadzor has issued more than 28,000 requests to delete publications and links that encourage minors to commit suicide, contain child pornography or information about drugs.

Twitter content remains undeleted.

In response, Roskomnadzor announced an initial throttling of the service on 100% of mobile devices and on 50% of stationary devices. As Interfax reported, the Roskomnadzor press service said that three administrative violation protocols had been drawn up against Twitter.

The agency stressed that if Twitter continues to ignore the requirements of Russian law to remove prohibited content, the service could be blocked.

Roskomnadzor also said that it sent the company a letter warning about throttling Twitter’s speed and the possibility of a full block until the removal of information prohibited on the territory of the Russian Federation.

Twitter said it is deeply concerned about the growing attempts to block and restrict public communication on the internet.

Providers told RBC that Roskomnadzor could throttle the service’s speed through equipment installed on the networks of telecom operators as part of the so-called sovereign Runet law.

Experts say Roskomnadzor uses threat-countermeasure technologies (TSPU), operating via DPI. They allow isolating the traffic of a specific service from overall traffic and reducing its speed.

The technical director of RosKomSvoboda, Stanislav Shakirov, told ForkLog that providers cooperating with Roskomnadzor slow down traffic heading to Twitter’s servers. He noted that when using a VPN, throttling does not occur:

I really hope that today’s incident will hasten the transition of internet users to the Encrypted SNI protocol, which will not allow blocking.

Earlier, experts stated that it was DPI-equipped equipment used during the internet shutdown in Belarus.

Following the Belarus internet shutdown: how to bypass blocks and when it is impossible to do so

Deputy head of Roskomnadzor, Vadim Subbotin, said there are legal grounds for blocking Twitter in Russia, but such measures have not yet been taken.

Lawyers say blocking can be implemented in accordance with the provisions of the law He also stressed that Twitter could become a pioneer who will be blocked under the new mechanism, not via telecom operators, but from Roskomnadzor’s unified traffic-management centre.

Later Roskomnadzor said Google paid a fine of 3 million rubles for not removing prohibited content. In the statement, the agency referred to the aforementioned law Об информации, noting that search engines must exclude from results in Russia links to internet resources with information prohibited in the country.

Earlier that morning, March 10, outages hit several government sites — Roskomnadzor itself, the Kremlin, the State Duma, the government and the prime minister stopped loading.

In the Ministry of Digital Development, they said the problems were caused by failures in Rostelecom equipment, not Twitter throttling. Rostelecom later said the network had been restored.

Outages affected not only government services. Roskomnadzor explained the problems accessing YouTube, Google and other services as a data-centre outage in Strasbourg. The agency also denied any link between these outages and Twitter throttling actions.

Meanwhile, experts noted that throttling affected domains containing the substring t.co.

Pushed more tests. Domain comparison is done by substring; look for the string “https://t.co/qA7YZCTicY” (Twitter’s short domain). Any domain containing the string https://t.co/qA7YZCTicY will be throttled. At Github — https://t.co/IxGNnBBJ8l

githubuserconten_t.co_m

— ValdikSS (@ValdikSS) March 10, 2021

As a result, many resources were throttled.

Source: NTC.

Earlier, Roskomnadzor opened administrative proceedings against Twitter for failing to provide information on the localization of Russian users’ databases on servers located in Russia.

As reported earlier, from 1 February a law came into force in Russia obliging social networks to identify and block illegal content.

Experts explained how the Russian law on self-censorship of social networks will work

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