Russian Search Engine Yandex Announces That Unregistered Media Will Disappear From Search Results

Kseniya Babich, a journalist and press secretary of the Rights Initiative, was searched today at dawn in connection with the case of Right Sector press secretary Artyom Skoropadsky, her classmate at Moscow State University, Novaya Gazeta reported.

He added that investigators seized Babich’s computer, telephone and other devices as “material evidence”. As she was trying to write a post about the search on Facebook, an officer grabbed the cell phone from her hand and erased it.

Ukraine’s TV 112, where Babich worked as a freelance reporter, said she had been summoned to the interrogator’s office at 11:00 am today Moscow time.

Later, Babich told 112 that interrogators had asked her about her work at Ukrainian television and her relationship to Skoropadsky. 

Skorpadsky himself said in a statement on 112 that Babich had nothing to do with either Right Sector or politics. 

Babich, who is a Russian citizen, was born in Crimea. 

In September, the Investigative Committee opened a case on charges of “extremism” against Dmytro Yarosh, the head of the Ukrainian ultra-right group Right Sector banned in Russia. Also named in the case were Skoropadsky, Andrei Tarasenko, Andrei Stempitsky, and Valery Voronov.

— Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

Yandex announced yesterday, October 20, that media that is not registered with Roskomnadzor, the state media monitoring agency, will see its stories disappear from the front page of Yandex News as well as regional and subject pages, Meduza reported.

If we post the name “Boris Rotenberg” today in Yandex.News, we won’t get Navalny’s blog, but we will get the returns from sites that are registered and happened to write about Navalny’s post.

That might lead us to conclude that if approved media go on being brave enough to write about what Navalny said, then the censorship of sites like his will not appear so blanketing.

But we can’t count on media continuing to be brave (or simply commercially interested in increased traffic from hits by readers interested in the topics Navalny covers). The Russian media has increasingly come under pressure and even editors fired for covering the Kremlin, Putin personally and his relatives and close associates critically.

And not every story will be covered as top news and therefore show up in search results. 

To see how censorship becomes more thorough if a writer is less likely to be covered than Navalny, or covers topics outside his realm, we can just take a look, at random, at the top post today by Vitaly Portnikov on grani.ru titled “Untrustworthy Management” comparing Putin and Qaddafi, another site blocked by the censor for its critical coverage and commentary. 

Let’s say you had heard that Portnikov had written an article with this title and tried to find it. If you plug the Russian-language search terms into Yandex.ru (“Недоверительное управление and “Виталий Портников”) the results page will tell you “news on your inquiry has not been found”. All you will see are two paid ads, one for “Russian newspapers abroad” and another for a show with an emigre Russian economist. 

Rambler, another Russian service, also says “Unfortunately, nothing was found for your inquiry” and posts ads for Russian business degrees and a Russian TV show about America.

It’s not clear if these services have agreed to block the sites indicated by the Russian government from their search results on those foreign-language versions of their services.

If we go over to Google.com, however, we will have no trouble finding Portnikov’s article in the very first search return.