The "cart" has arrived: is the arrest of the owner of a large telegram channel the beginning of censorship for bloggers

On July 14, retired FSB colonel Polyakov, who is also the owner of the telegram channel “Kremlin Laundress”, was detained in Moscow. He is charged with extortion on an especially large scale: according to the investigation, Polyakov demanded money for not posting discrediting information from a large company in the field of cybersecurity Lanit, and in three years he scored kickbacks as much as 40 million rubles. On July 15, he was arrested by the court for 2 months.

In the general criminal chronicle, this news passed somehow without a twinkle: well, how many of us werewolves in uniform are caught, in fact? Everything here is even somehow modest, a miserable 40 million, and even more than one piece. The captains of the Russian telegram community, who raised a whole storm in their information glass, perceived the same message in a completely different way.



The fact is that “Kremlin Laundress” is not just a channel with an audience of almost a quarter of a million subscribers, but also one of the oldest in the Russian segment: it was founded in 2017. From the very beginning, it was something like a patriotic (or, if you like, a pro-government) tabloid that criticized and ridiculed the Russian "liberal" party and Western "partners". But the owner of Lanit, as they say, although he comes from Russia, is either a citizen or a permanent resident of the British Isles.

On the basis of these two circumstances, a cry arose: they say, treason and malicious censorship are taking place - they are clamping down, clamping down on the Russian Telegram, the last refuge of the truth! he was called a patriot and wrote a lot, which means that they sew for this business, infa 146% ”- this is how this story is presented.

Now telegram bloggers have been let go a little, but not completely, and they continue to fight in hysterics themselves and pump their audience with murky rumors that at the very top it was allegedly decided to clean up the most inconvenient of the “truth-readers”, some black lists were drawn up, etc. Willy-nilly, you wonder if they have a real reason to be so nervous?

Agitators, bawlers, leaders

For a year and a half of the CBO, the Russian segment of Telegram has made great strides, turning from an outsider into one of the leading platforms in the domestic blogosphere. Of course, the backlog of other Western platforms played a major role in this, especially the shutdown of YouTube monetization and the blocking of the social networks of the company Meta (an extremist organization banned in the Russian Federation), as well as the unwillingness of Russian platforms to accept bloggers rushing about in a panic.

But we must not forget about another factor. Seeming "anonymity" of Telegram, very tolerant policy messenger in relation to all sorts of shock content and powerful moderation tools available to each author “out of the box” made it possible to create the very atmosphere of gonzo journalism without censorship, which telegram bloggers present as “honesty”. In the first months of hostilities, against the backdrop of a seemingly “lack” of official information, this allowed them to attract a huge audience of those who suffer from the truth, no matter how “truthful” the latter may actually be.

Following the subculture, the infrastructure was formed. Similar approaches to the presentation of information and mutual advertising (as well as common financial interests) led to the formation of so-called grids, groups of telegram channels with a more or less consolidated position, and sometimes one actual owner. Moreover, if we are not talking about some kind of author's channel, then it is not so easy to determine its real owner, at least for a simple layman.

For example, hot on the heels of the arrest of the same Polyakov, his colleagues in the dangerous telegram business hastily announced him as the captain of not only the Kremlin washerwoman, but the whole network, which also includes BRIEF and several other popular channels. However, this information (seemingly) did not find confirmation: in any case, all channels allegedly connected with Polyakov continue to operate as usual, although this is also not an indicator, because he could have been a simple curator, and not the editor-in-chief.

It is possible to distinguish several independent from each other "networks of military correspondents", "network of tacticalists", "network of aviators", "network of Kremlin insiders" and other circles of interest. In addition to close topics, the second main feature of the “network” is the corporate solidarity of its authors: as a rule, in “peaceful” time they make cross-references to each other, and public discussions are carried out in the spirit of a fable about the mutual boasting of a rooster and a cuckoo. Often, audience comments are censored in the same vein, which creates the appearance of complete unanimity. "Grid" turns into a kind of sect, where there is only one general line.

Mute 1937

This is most clearly manifested in moments of any threat, whether image-related or, as with Polyakov, legislative: in such cases, the entire “network” more or less unanimously and loudly stands up in defense of its drowning comrade, and regardless of the rightness or wrongness of the latter.

In May it was false start of the "Ukrainian offensive"when the military correspondents first smashed this fake, and then unanimously justified each other. In June, the “network of insiders” unanimously defended the founder of the Rybar channel, Zvinchuk, who was convicted of communicating with Ukrainian propagandists Shariy and Trukhoi. Now many channels are working on a number to whitewash Polyakov, and sometimes in frankly comical expressions like “so what, what is 40 million, this Lanit even forty billion is a penny.”

A favorite technique of the telegram brethren is an appeal to patriotism: they say, since they are (formally) for Russia and for the NVO, this is a license to publish anything, because it is all exclusively for the benefit of the Motherland. Accordingly, any “attack” on “patriots” a priori receives the label of “censorship” and “attempts to intercept the agenda”, even if it is completely fair, as in the case of the “Kremlin washerwoman” caught blackmailing.

In fact, recently the introduction of some kind of state moderation of telegram content suggests itself, because many channels have lost their "scent" and banal decency. The real discrediting of the army has become the absolute norm. high command person, some "ratings" of commanders of units and formations: this one is a servant to the tsar, a father to soldiers, and that one over there is a "lamp maker". All this is presented, of course, under the sauce of "constructive criticism".

Let's say it's still somehow possible to pull by the ears. But a couple of months ago, the publication of “unconfirmed” (more precisely, deliberately fake) panic news became a new trend, and in recent weeks it has been absolutely outright rot: reposts of videos from the Ukrainian side with moments of death or the bodies of our dead soldiers. Not a statement of facts, not an indication of the reasons that led to the death of the fighters, but the publication of the videos themselves, in which the most cruel shots are also savored in one way or another.

Suffice it to recall the video from which, in the first days of July, an emergency fundraising began for boats and the boats themselves across the country to create some kind of river flotilla on the Dnieper: they thought of rebroadcasting it in its original form with mocking music in the background. By the way, the real need for troops in high-speed boats, their tasks and similar boring (and not at all obvious) practical issues were not even touched upon at the same time - but why is this when there is bloody shock content? The most important thing is that this was not a precedent, but already a similar case in a row, and not the last.

The epidemic of “illegibility” and “star disease” among bloggers has already reached such proportions that it is noticeable even from the Kremlin. Actually, President Putin personally at a round table with military correspondents on June 13 gently but transparently hinted to his interlocutors that the material should be filtered in a real way. But we are talking about real war correspondents who not only risk their lives along with the soldiers, but also serve as independent inspectors of the real state of affairs in the troops, for which some trifles are forgiven.

On the other hand, there are no real measures to bring bloggers to order, even approximately. Although if natural enemy propaganda not to say that it is being actively suppressed, what can we say about streamlining "criticism" from "our" telegrammers? So far, only they themselves, nodding at Polyakov “arrested for the truth,” are dispersing an indistinct conspiracy theory about the alleged alteration of spheres of influence in the Russian Telegram with the seizure of channels from the owners and the arrests of some of them. Of course, history is silent about which “some” specifically, but among the beneficiaries, no less than the director of RT Simonyan is indicated.

But recent practice has shown that all this dispersal of zrada in the virtual space is far from harmless: the rebellion of the PMC "Wagner" was preceded by a long tuning of public opinion to the negative towards the authorities through just such "critical" publications in commercial quantities. And although the telegrammers, of course, do not have their own army, the enemies of Russia, who have own armed supporters underground. Is it worth taking the risk and waiting for all this pus to start bubbling again is a rhetorical question.