Russia Restricting Google News Over Aggregated Stories About Ukraine War – CNET

Russia has restricted access to Google News, a further escalation of the information battle being waged within the country after its invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, Google said Thursday.

“We’ve confirmed that some people are having difficulty accessing the Google News app and website in Russia and that this is not due to any technical issues on our end,” said Google in a statement to TechCrunch. The search giant went on to say, “We’ve worked hard to keep information services like News accessible to people in Russia for as long as possible.”

While Google didn’t outright say that Russia is blocking its news aggregation service, the company did concede in the above statement that there’s a chance its services could be blocked entirely in the future.

Roskomnadzor, Russia’s federal agency in charge of overseeing and censoring media within the country, claimed last week that YouTube ads were distributing “information attacks” against Russian citizens that were “of a terrorist nature.” The statement by Roskomnadzor claimed that the ads present an anti-Russian narrative by Google, an American company. Reuters did report yesterday that Google had paused ads in Russia that exploited or dismissed the war. This pause came with an update to its ads policy. 

“We can confirm that we’re taking additional steps to clarify, and in some instances expand our monetization guidelines as they relate to the war in Ukraine,” said Google in a statement to TechCrunch. “This builds on our current restrictions on Russian state-funded media, as well as our ongoing enforcement against content that incites violence or denies the occurrence of tragic events.”

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

According to DownDetector’s Russian website, it seems that YouTube is still operational within the country, although there was a spike in crash reports in the morning at around 10:00 a.m. 

Unfortunately, DownDetector doesn’t look at Google News separately, but only Google as a whole. Google itself, however, has seen some fluctuations in crash reports, far more than YouTube. 

Russia has been taking strong measures in clamping down on the spread of information within the country. Earlier this week, it reportedly placed bans on all Meta platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram, minus WhatsApp. The Russian regime has also clamped down on certain verbiage regarding the war. If journalists call the conflict a “war” or “invasion” rather than a “special operation,” they can receive up to a 15-year prison sentence. 

The list of tech companies that have left Russia is large and includes Amazon, Apple, Disney, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Netflix, Nintendo, Samsung, Sony and TikTok, among others. 

Given all the restrictions and bans, it’s no surprise that Russians are flocking to VPNs to continue gaining access to services. VPNs have seen a surge in downloads in Russia by 4,375%, according to an analysis from AppFigures. Lithuanian VPN service Surfshark said that Russia has blocked 36,000 VPN-related sites this past month. 

Surfshark did not immediately respond to a request for comment.