Senators lack censorship – Newspaper Kommersant No. 200 (7401) of 10/27/2022

The Interim Commission of the Federation Council for the Protection of State Sovereignty and Prevention of Interference in Russia’s Internal Affairs held a round table on Wednesday on “countering hostile narratives in the information, cultural and educational environment.” Senators, public figures and experts agreed that the Russian “mental space” has undergone an “invasion”, which must be repelled by all available methods: from blocking social networks to introducing military censorship.

Opening the event, Andrey Klimov, chairman of the commission, drew attention to the problem of the “spiritual component of Russian sovereignty” – for example, the dominance of Anglicisms. “The inhabitants of Novorossiya entered into a deadly battle with the Russophobic Nazis for the right to speak Russian, and in Russia itself, the clogging of speech by all sorts of co-working spaces, co-living spaces and other marketplaces has not yet been eliminated,” the senator lamented. He proposed to replace the anglicism “coworking” with the original Russian term “co-working” and immediately began to actively use it.

Igor Ashmanov, a member of the Presidential Human Rights Council, spoke next and spoke about the “invasion of our mental space” through Internet publics and Telegram channels. According to him, “all Ukrainian cybercrime has switched to the war with Russia”, and some “groups” spend “up to 1-2 billion rubles. per week”, and the total costs of the West for these purposes reach “$1-2 billion per month”. “They have an endless supply of personnel: only in the USA and Canada there are 4 million former compatriots who do not like us very much and who are easy to recruit,” said Mr. Ashmanov.

The methods of dealing with such an “invasion” are well known, the HRC member said, first of all it is the blocking of social networks, which several of them have already undergone: “Even small barriers kill the audience, it gradually shrinks and becomes homogeneous: only liberals remain friend, how they are against the war and Russia.

However, Russian social networks also “still do not understand that there is an information war going on” and do not delete Ukrainian publics, Igor Ashmanov complained. He sees the way out of this situation as the creation of the “Rosinformburo” with the powers of military censorship, which “will stifle enemy propaganda”: ​​“Someone has to make decisions very quickly, up to the telephone right, call the media and say: if you don’t take it off now you won’t have a license by tonight.”

Senator Alexander Bashkin agreed that “now every minute, not even a second, is valuable,” and if a fake appears on the network, then it needs to be removed “immediately.” In this regard, he proposed to authorize Roskomnadzor to independently block such information, without waiting for an appeal from the prosecutor’s office.

In addition, Mr. Bashkin called for the introduction of administrative liability for social networks that oppose self-censorship.

About the representatives of show business, some of whom did not support the special military operation (SVO) and left Russia, the senator and former musician of the Lube group Alexander Weinberg spoke emotionally: “I simply despise and disdain many colleagues in the workshop: they left the country, from Motherland. We cannot forbid them to return, but they should not enjoy any benefits of the state, privileges, honor – only eternal contempt. Developing this idea, Alexei Mukhin, director of the Center for Political Information, proposed classifying cultural figures based on their attitude to the NWO: dividing them into frightened patriots (“who run, everything is clear with them”), patriots (“who remain despite the pressure of the Western environment”) , turbo-patriots (“who should moderate their activity”) and “swamp”. And a member of the Civic Chamber of the Russian Federation, Alexander Malkevich, put forward a completely unusual idea – “to legalize at some legal level a thing that is unpleasant for many” and to force the heads of state corporations, budgetary organizations and state media “to publicly state their position on the SVO”. “If you are in charge of the regional state newspaper, you must identify yourself: are you with your state or not,” the public figure hit himself in the chest.

Representatives of the academic community also spoke at the event. For example, Henry Sardaryan, Dean of the Faculty of Management and Politics at MGIMO, criticized the dependence of Russian universities on foreign citation indices – Scopus and Web of Science. “So you write about gender equality, minority rights, and so on. After the start of the CBO, a domestic analogy was developed, but its essence boiled down to the fact that if you want to become a top scientist, then you must publish in journals that are included in both Scopus and Web of Science. Who do you think are idiots? he asked rhetorically.

Andrey Klimov, this topic touched a nerve. “The President proclaimed the fight against neo-colonialism in all its manifestations, and all these “scopus shmopuses” are just pure neo-colonialism. Whoever does not understand, we will treat, ”the senator promised. He also did not rule out that “all these scopuses” will be classified as foreign influence and from December 1 will fall under the new law on foreign agents.

Andrew Ashes