Digital Iron Curtain. These three words manage to capture both historical, ideological divides, and also more modern-day questions of technology, power, and control. In other words, some seriously heavy stuff. Since we’re using the phrase digital iron curtain, referred to the mechanisms that split the Internet, long thought of as borderless along geopolitical fault lines.

We’ve all heard of restrictions on tech. We’ve all heard of firewalls limiting the flow of information into autocracies. We’ve all heard of Internet shutdowns. Again, there’s also what goes on beyond the digital iron curtain – propaganda, disinformation, information vacuums. Let’s have a look at this video.

So much for limitless. The world wide web – it can be closed off, monitored, and filtered. Is freedom of information a utopian idea? Let’s face it, access denied, a new digital iron curtain shaping tomorrow now.

Can the digital iron curtain be swept aside? Personally, I don’t know the answer to this question.But we have four panelists who might be able to help us with that today, starting with Maria Makeeva, editor-in-chief of OstWest TV in Berlin, the only Russian-language TV channel in Germany specializing in independent European news in Russian. A hand for Maria, please.

At the end, please. Thank you. Leonid Volkov, chief-of-staff and political director for the team of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, now jailed of course. He’s also founder of the Internet Protection Society, Russia’s leading digital rights NGO.

We would also like to welcome Lutz Guellner, the head of division for strategic communications and information analysis in the European External Action Service. Welcome.

Joining us on the line from Taipei is Taiwan’s Digital Minister and renowned hacktivist, Audrey Tang. Hello.

Thank you all for being here. To you, our dear audience, we will also have a chance to ask them questions as well , whether you’re following us online or you’re joining us here in the hall. Do take advantage.

First, my questions of course. I would like to start with one for all of you. The digital iron curtain sounds like an abstract concept to many people. Can you tell us how it has affected you concretely or your work? Starting with Maria, please.

How it’s affected me, it affected people in Russia first of all. I’m talking about the iron curtain between Russia and the other world. Also, remember three years ago in this exact chamber, we’ve seen the video of Leonid Volkov who should be here personally, physically. He wasn’t because he was in jail. He took 20 days for protests, but we received his video. Technologically, it was possible, but it didn’t help not to go to prison for some protest, for example.

I understand now, why Putin needs this new iron curtain, but what I do not understand, why the West needs it. Because. what we see, it’s the building of iron curtain from both sides. Like the colleague before here on plenary session from Myanmar, she told about Google Documents they exchanged to provide independent information.

We couldn’t do it. Our colleagues in Russia couldn’t do it because we couldn’t use Google Documents anymore. Whom does it help, should I ask? There are many, many examples like this. For example, Visa and Mastercard, they left Russia. It absolutely destroyed independent journalistic business.

For Meduza, for example. This is the main example of independent journalism in Russian language from abroad. They’re very successful. Their business model was very successful. Now, it’s absolutely destroyed by that. There are many examples like this.

Probably, we’re not talking about shaping tomorrow at this moment, but we’re shaping the day after tomorrow. Who are you going to talk to? I mean t -oriented to the West in Russia, they are affected by sanctions and by…I don’t know how it’s called. It’s a wave of Western company just leaving Russian out of sanctions just because they felt they need to leave. Sometimes it help build the new Iron Curtain, Iron War world.

How we provide independent information to people left in Russia? How we provide that for them? This is a real problem. In Soviet times, in the end of Soviet times, the main strategy of the West was advertising of Western way of life, Western values, and everything. How are you going to advertise this? This is my question now.

Now, you’ve managed to touch on many aspects there, but I feel like the natural next person to answer this question is Leonid since we’re already talking about Russia, please.

Yeah. Thank you for the invitation. I’m very happy that now I’m talking to this forum directly and not from jail. That’s much better experience despite my train was late this morning. This is no coincidence that Vladimir Putin and Kremlin shut down all independent media in Russia on the first day of the war. They clearly understand that a media landscape is a part of the warfare.

It is also our understanding. This war, the war of Russia against Ukraine is being fought on three fronts. There is a military one, the very obvious, where Ukrainian armed forces resist aggression. There is also the economic front, of course, for sanctions. Sanctions are being applied to make it harder actually for Putin to finance the war.

Then, there is an informational front where we, like Maria, Meduza, Doshd - like remaining independent media or of what remains of independent media are trying to push our message through to reach out through regular Russians, to the general audience to tell them the truth, to counter the propaganda, to counter Russian disinformation, to talk to them.

That’s very important because so much depends actually on the attitude of the Russian society. This actually could stop the war. Like 1914 on all sides in the front, they were like, “Go fight. Kill them all. Protect the fatherland.” 1918, “You don’t belong there. You go home. This is not your war.” It was both in Russia, and in Germany, and in France, and the war came to them.

Same, army is part of society. Morale of the army depends very much on the attitude of the society. So working with what people think about the war and so on is very important. We now have, for instance, like the monthly audience of approximately 20 million monthly active users in Russia. That’s a lot.

But to stay in touch with them, we have to rely on a very narrow channel of communication like on YouTube - we are hostages of the Western tech platforms and their policies. We have had quite unpleasant experiences in the past.

Like, for instance, this very well-known case when in September 2021, on the eve of the parliamentary election in Russia, Google and Apple caved to the unlawful censorship requests by Russian authorities and took away our voting app, which distributed independent voting endorsements for independent candidate upcoming election.

It has been removed because Kremlin threatened them, blackmailed them, put pressure on them, and they caved. Now, they see that many things are also happening in this regard. For instance, as Maria already mentioned, many companies leaving Russia, leaving Russians without access to independent information.

There are all sorts of examples, for instance, Cloudflare, the DDoS product which was a huge web hoster, told “We will not only leave Russia, we’ll reinforce. We will allocate more server capacities for Russia. Provide Russians with some sense of Internet access.” These are very few examples. Most of the independent media in Russia are now locked. Not most, 99 percent of them. You could only access them through VPNs.

We invested a lot in educating Russians about VPNs and they installed basic software, but for these VPN service, you have to pay. You can’t do it, because Visa and Mastercard are not working in the country anymore.

This access to information resisting digital Iron Curtain, requests a lot of work from both sides, not only from civil society and from those who want to break through through the digital Iron Curtain, but also from the western governments and first of all [inaudible 11:15] .

Now, I want to grab on to a word that you mentioned there and it’s participation. And I would like to go to Adrey Tang, who can tell us something about this. Also again, the original question of how you have been affected by the digital iron curtain.

For me, the digital iron curtain is not something new, it shaped my career, as around the century, I was working with Freenet and later on with Tor, and with many peer-to-peer decentralized communication technologies around the time that the golden shield program gets designed and then later implemented.

For the past 20 years or so, I’ve witnessed data civic infrastructure that we have built around those hacktivist protest-oriented technologies, they turn into possible civic spaces infrastructures even in entirely off-the-grid situations.

For example, the end-to-end encryption that our community build toward Bluetooth-based conversations - FireChat and so on - turned into Manyverse and many other off-the-grid communication channels that enable to secure free-from-surveillance communications even in off-the-grid situations.

I would say that a lot of the on-the-street, what we call situation applications that people build when we, for example, occupied peacefully our parliament in 2014, March, for three weeks.

That enabled half a million people to have a deliberative conversations on the street translated directly into from the media competence, used in democratic countries into the sort of civic resistance infrastructure used in more off-the-grid authoritarian situations, because it’s open-sourced and shared with the world.

We’re really starting to see the connection here between the free Internet and democratic participation. I’d like your perspective now, Lutz on that first question that we asked. How has it affected your work in particular?

We have for a very long time praised, and rightly so, the opportunity that the net and the connection that the digital developments offer us. I think we have discussed it over the last one or two days here.

Now, we have started to realize that there are risks that we also need to look at, what you can do on the bad side, so to say, that you can manipulate. I think this is a very, very important world in all this.

This can be in the form of creating barriers, in creating controls that is, of course, for domestic use. I think we heard already some of these examples. I also want to look at a very specific phenomenon that we have discussed also yesterday very shortly. That is this issue of disinformation, of using this net as a strategic tool, as a strategic weapon so to say.

I actually don’t want to use the word disinformation, because disinformation implies that there is good and bad information. That there is right and wrong, and true and false. We know that there are many grey areas in between.

I think the real thing we need to worry about is information manipulation. What is the difference? The difference is that there are states or structures that actually use specific strategies to develop very clear instruments, very clear tactics also to deploy the information environment at large for their own strategic tools.

That can be a state, that can be a non-state actor as well. I think we should be much more kind of aware of that in the sense of seeing also that this is a whole ecosystem that is mobilized from media, state media to websites, to social media. It all belongs together.

The most important point is that all this is very asymmetric, because we have this discussion: What are the ones doing? What are we doing? How do we respond? Very often we don’t even have the right mindset to respond to this.

We come with this idea of informing, of setting narratives, of engaging, while very often these other actors and in particular the Russian state operators, is there to mislead. Is there to influence. Is there to manipulate. I think this we need to understand much better, and that is of course affecting my work tremendously and everything that we’re doing.

With what mindset are we supposed to come?

With a more holistic mindset, I think. This is not just about the one side sets a narrative or a false information and we need to respond with better information. I think on one panel yesterday, somebody said - I don’t know who it was - that she was sick and tired of fact-checking.

I wouldn’t be tired of fact-checking, it’s still important, but it’s not the only response. We need to think much broader. We need to look at what we can do on the upstream, so to deter these actors from deploying these tactics, these approaches and we need to look at the downstream.

How can we sharpen, how can we improve also our own resilience? These things always need to be done as one package. We cannot just look at, “Let’s regulate the social media platforms, then we have solved the issue.” No. It might be an important element, but it’s only one of the building blocks.

Let’s do quality journalism. Yes, it’s an important element, but it’s only one and all this you need to think together and that’s very challenging for politics and policy, I think.

Audrey Tang. You’ve done a lot of work into ensuring a democratic Internet in Taiwan. Do you agree with Mister Lutz Guellner’s views?

Certainly. I think the importance of fact-checking ecosystem is very similar to contact tracing in fighting of a pandemic. In fighting of infodemic or information manipulation, of course, we cannot rely on contact tracing alone, that is to say, proper attribution and so on.

We need also to first build a good habit of what we call media competence here in Taiwan, instead of just media literacy in our basic and lifelong education.

When middle schoolers can fact-check the three presidential candidates or if they’re having real-time debates, when their fact-checks appear on the screen, their live TV, for everyone, it’s not just about fact-checking as a thing that students learn. Rather, it’s about something actively civic, that they contribute to the society.

Then the students very quickly learn about the same civic tech communities, not just the cofacts channel. Instead of the professional journalists doing all the fact-checking, people can join in those local meetups, like the Wikipedia meetups that edits certain parts of Wikipedia, except of course in Taiwan, they go together and check particular aspects of the disinformation landscape so that can people can simply report, just like reporting spam, what’s the trending disinformation there is. If it’s information manipulation, people crowd source their intelligence.

At the end of the day, it is still vetted by someone in the international fact-checking network to add to the notice-and-public-notice regime. Before that, it is a collective learning tool. So instead of taking anything down, just like we don’t do lockdown here in Taiwan vis-à-vis the pandemic, we don’t do takedowns.

For the administration to take down something, is to take away, to decimate the agency of the people to learn together, to do this kind of developing their mental antibodies to the virus of the mind, if you will.

This mandatory labeling, the participation of all the large platforms, the establishment of local civic spaces that adhere to those norms before the international counterparts do, all that strengthens the negotiation power of our democracy vis-à-vis the global platforms when it comes to disinformation antibodies development.

Now, these are some very good macro-level recommendations.

I was wondering, Maria, since you had already mentioned it earlier, you said that one of the hardest parts about the existence of the digital iron curtain, for you as a journalist, of course, is getting information to audiences. What has that experience been like for you?

Nowadays, receiving information from Russia is very, very difficult. You have to find the brave people who stayed there who want to report you back. The second thing is that you have to find a way to pay them.

This is also a question of technology if I run digital curtain. And this all left for us, for journalists. Maria Ressa yesterday told that we do not, I mean journalists, do not embrace technology enough, but nobody told us we should be not just humanitarians who rights go to presented good. We should be like technology geniuses.

Come on. We will need some help here in this field. This is now it’s a very, very challenging moment how to reach the sources of information there. Look, for me, journalism is not only information that will check-in, and this is all good, but I’m working for television. That means what? Entertainment.

People want to watch something nice sometimes, and then they will watch your news probably a little bit, which is very good. This is how Russian state propaganda is working. They have very good entertainers. Another example, for example, company Netflix left Russia completely.

People paid for Netflix - oriented, West-oriented people who want to pay for the production, not just go to Pirates and watch it. They feel bad. Just imagine, what if Netflix stays and then start to show, for example, documentaries on Ukraine war or just news from independent sources, which could be more helpful.

What we’re seeing now on Netflix available abroad. Where abroad? In Germany. I turned on Netflix last week. What I see that they just purchased a movie of Sergei Straczynski. Leonid, you know him, this is an ex-advisor of Putin who became a hunter in Africa and the producer of movie of “Wild Nature”.

He produced a very good movie. He’s a rich man. He’s sold it to Netflix, and you can see it on Netflix now. Nobody explained the audience who Straczynski is.

Now, Leonid, you had already mentioned the big tech platforms earlier. Maria has just mentioned Netflix now. Now that Netflix has left, I want to ask you, we’ve seen bans of Instagram and Facebook back in March, what is the responsibility of tech platforms here? Do they have a responsibility to remain accessible to their users, even in the face of such bans?

Yes, they do. First of all because if it’s in their best business interests to stay in the country, to stay connected with their users, to protect their audience from abuse, also from government abuse. I would say the first step is that we ask them to do for many years they are now ready to do - which is not to put legal compliance ahead of human rights.

This has been their approach for many years. We have your local legal requirements in this country, and that country, and that country. We just follow them, and that’s it. These are local legal requirements. Now, the appetites of the dictators used to grow not only Putin’s but also all kinds of them.

Finally, after a lot of debate and after a lot of discussion, big tech companies started to learn that if they go to certain depths and just complying with legal requirements, they will just put their users at risk. Like when governments in countries like Russia started to ask for secret keys to be able to open encrypted chats. Soon companies realized they have to draw a line somewhere.

To draw a line along legal compliance was just too easy, too cheap. This is local law. This is local regulation. We just comply. Which is not local regulation, we don’t comply. To draw a line…This line was very visible. It was very easy to follow. To draw the line around human rights… what does protect users’ human rights?

What does correspond to users’ interests, and what does not - is much more challenging. It requires a lot of research and investment and a lot of understanding of local political and media landscape. Many mistakes have been made. Like the famous story about Myanmar and Facebook, moderators didn’t find anything bad about the hate speech against Rohingya people.

It happened in Russia, too. The things that I’ve already mentioned with them deleting [inaudible 25:27] independent voting application or banning content, just taking down content based on censorship requests by government bodies. Now, it looks like now they are ready to anticipate that in countries like Russia, Iran, China, you can just follow what the government is saying.

You don’t have to presume that the government is an actor acting in good faith. You have to double-check. You have to reach out to local communities, to local digital rights and journals, and so on. Now, I believe it’s time to make one step forward, which is to resist.

Just one simple example. If Google implements the protocol called ECH, Encrypted Client Hello, it makes obsolete the whole system of censorship which Russia has developed so far. I didn’t know about Chinese system of Internet censorship, but for Russian, it’s just true. They just switch it on.

They just need to push one button, and everything that Russian and famous censorship board of Roskomnadzor did since 2011, and they invested billions, and they stole billions. Also, this enormous system of content, field filtering, and blacklisting, it just stops working. They will not be able to work. I don’t get an answer from them. Why is it they shouldn’t do it?

Another example, Instagram, as you mentioned, has been blacklisted in Russia in the first days of the war. Instagram has been the second-largest media platform after YouTube. Instagram didn’t resist. They could, and this is well known. It’s well-described and well-documented how Russian censorship model actually works.

While it’s hardly possible to protect a website from being blacklisted. The only way to access a blacklisted website would be via a Tor browser or via VPN or tools like Psiphon - for an application to protect itself from those in blacklist,hat’s not rocket science.

Telegram did it in 2018. This isn’t the application you have many tools you could use different protocols, rotate IP addresses of your servers. It requires a bit of investment, a bit of technical competence, and a lot of knowledge of the country you’re operating in.

Then, your users are protected, and your users can communicate. We see this lack of knowledge and lack of understanding. For Instagram, it was easier to say, “OK, our user base in Russia is now down from 60 million daily users, down to 17.” They lost 43 million users, like a country like France. Why? [laughs]

If they just would think a little bit about what they could do, they could be able to find a way. For the media landscape, for independent media, for activists for organizations like the Anti-Corruption Foundation, or Independent Broadcasters, this will be awesome, a very good thing. It also corresponds to their business interests. A bit more competence is needed.

A bit more competence. At this stage, we’d like to take a question from L.A. in Germany. How can we differentiate between critical thinking if applied to contexts where doubts are used by “the outside” to destabilize and disinformation? Audrey Tang, perhaps you could take that one?

Anything that adds to the context, that makes it easier for people to see that there is a source, that you can go back to the source, is adding to the discussion.

A lot can be said to the public spaces in the digital realm around how we interact. For example, in Taiwan, the civic platform, the equivalent of Reddit, is maintained by the open-source community, is self-governed to a degree under the academic network.

People learned to navigate those additional contributions as critical thinking with their own meta-level analysis tool to, for example, uncover coordinated, inauthentic behavior without waiting for the state capacity to do that.

Once sufficient amount of young Internet users – and old, through lifelong learning – learn to spot those patterns, it beats the state-organized counter-disinformation efforts because everyone can set up their own analysis. And it raises that awareness that there is actually information manipulation going on.

A re-contextualizing service on a pro-social space, preferably operated by the civic media and civic technologist, that would be the best way to see those disinformation manipulations as potentially also adding to the context.

Lutz, I see that you want to add something, but it’s standing in the room and we have to ask it. Audrey Tang said something earlier about how bans and takedowns take away the agency of the users. Now, of course, the EU has blocked RT and Sputnik. Is that not equivalent to censorship within the EU as well?

Clearly, no, and I come back to this. I wanted to add something to what Audrey Tang has just said. We seem to have this dilemma on how do we deal with this content? How do we classify it? When is it good? When is it bad? When do we need to act, and when don’t we have to act?

We all agree here in this room that the big difficulty of this disinformation, if we want to use that term, is that it’s not illegal. There’s no law that forbids somebody to lie or to tell the untruth. How do we do this? There’s a solution. The solution – I could do this academically – is the ABC model.

The ABC model is, we need to look at the actor, we need to look at the behavior, and the content, so not only at the content. We also need to see which strategy is being deployed. Which tactics are being used to amplify, and which actor is using this? Only then we have a much better idea how this is working.

I see Audrey Tang nodding, and we are in contact with many, many partners, including her department, in terms of our international partners to develop this approach. That would get us out of this dilemma. You have the freedom of speech, even with the most absurd positions, but as long as it’s genuine.

The problem kicks in when there is artificial amplification, when it’s not anymore a genuine voice, when there is manipulation of the identity, when there is manipulation of the reach. This is what we need to focus on. You have the freedom of speech, but you don’t have the right to a megaphone.

To your other question on the sanctions. We did not look at this from, “Ooh, there is an article that we didn’t like, or there’s a journalist who said something that we don’t like.” We looked at the overall situation. The overall situation is that RT and Sputnik have been used, and continue to be used, as strategic instruments of the state.

There are no media outlets, in the sense how we would define it, with publishing ethics, with clear ideas how the editorial independents, how the editorial line is being done. I very often, especially here in this forum, get the question, “What’s the difference between Deutsche Welle and Russia Today?” These are totally different organizations.

I don’t think I need to ask. [laughs]

Of course, I’m preaching to the converted if I look at you, but I come back to this. We have sanctioned not content that we did not like – that’s why it’s not censorship – but we stopped the Russian state operators from using strategic instruments to underpin, to support its strategic aims. In that case, the war against Ukraine.

This is the logic. Of course, we are doing this on the basis of law. You can challenge that. That is happening at the moment. I would always argue, let’s please not compare apples and pears because these so-called outlets are no media in the classic sense. We need to very, very careful about this.

Can I add something to this?

Yes, please. Then, we have time for one question. Maria…

I just heard a story today in the morning from one German friend of mine. His parents are from eastern part of Germany. Now, they use VPN to watch Russia today because they suspect that something, probably around them, want to receive some other information. This is very difficult, and very wide question: Should somebody be banned or not?

I forgot to say it in the very beginning, that all means are good if it leads to the end of the war. If not, probably should avoid some restrictions, what I want to tell. Now, the Europe is in the war, so all means are good to stop it.

Thank you very much. The gentleman who had a question, perhaps you can stand up, say your name and your question, please?

Sure, thank you very much. I’m Oliver, deali with [inaudible 35:23] and Strategic Communication. I listened very carefully to this panel, and I have a question to Maria and Leonid.

As we learned a little bit about the measures of the European Union to tackle disinformation, increasing fact-checking, and, also first and forwards, to reaching out to people behind the digital curtain. Are you satisfied with these efforts or should the EU and their efforts, their campaigning more offensive?

If we can be brief, please? We’re under a lot of pressure. [laughs] Thank you.

That’s good that European Union is doing something. It’s too little, too late, definitely there. There are many practical steps that actually could be taken to increase accessibility of independent information for Russian users from [inaudible 36:27]. We have already touched upon the VPNs, which are now a necessity for everyone in Russia. There is a lot of demand for independent information, but Russians can’t afford it, can’t pay for them.

Not because they’re expensive – they’re not – but because they just don’t have payment tools. To revert VISA and Mastercard for wrong decision to leave Russian market, would be great. It was a clear case of collateral damage because no Putinist was hurt by this decision, only Putin’s opponents. But if it’s not - let’s do it reversely. The regular VPN service costs three euro a month.

The actual cost of the service is maybe 10 percent of that. All others is marketing, margin, and whatever, and the infrastructure of collecting three euro a month from [laughs] many users. No problem. Spend this money on this side. Provide a high-quality, free service, accessible and least-resistant, so there’s some technology.

Not just a mainstream VPN, but a little bit of technical sophistication instead. Promote it. Russians will be thankful. It will make a difference [inaudible 37:50] , very important when [inaudible 37:52] help a lot. Now, US is doing something like this. They have invested very much, and Siphon and [inaudible 37:57]. Europe is not doing anything like this.

Leonid? I’m so sorry, we have to leave it there. Perhaps you can network with Maria Makeeva afterwards to hear her views. At this stage, I’d like to thank my panelists. Thank you very much for the insights, Maria Makeeva, Leonid Volkov, Lutz Guellner, and Audrey Tang. Thank you, all.

I’d like to turn over the floor to my colleague, Javier Arguedas.