Russia’s intelligence service, the FSB, reportedly intimidated Google and Apple into removing the Smart Voting app from their platforms because of its affiliation with Alexei Navalny.
Reuters says Navalny’s allies “planned to use the mobile app to organise a tactical voting campaign to deal a blow to United Russia.” But it was removed from Google Play and the App Store mere days before polls opened for the Russian parliamentary election in September 2021.
The Washington Post now reports that “Russian agents came to the home of Google’s top executive in Moscow to deliver a frightening ultimatum last September: take down an app that had drawn the ire of Russian President Vladimir Putin within 24 hours or be taken to prison.”
Those agents followed this executive to a hotel they were moved to under an assumed name, according to the report, which also says that Apple’s “main representative in Moscow faced a similarly harrowing sequence.” The companies then removed the app from their platforms.
Google and Apple haven’t responded to a request for comment.
Russia has outright banned many platforms in the weeks following its invasion of Ukraine. Access to Facebook, Twitter, and soon Instagram has been restricted due to those platforms’ unwillingness to amplify Russian state media’s disinformation about the conflict with Ukraine.
But this report from the Post shows that Russia’s efforts to influence, impede, and intimidate Western tech companies didn’t start with the invasion of Ukraine. Instead it seems the Russian government has been working for a while to bend these platforms to its will.
