Copyright The New York Times
In Russia, it’s hard to escape MAX, the new state-controlled messaging app. Billboards are trumpeting it. Schools are recommending it. Celebrities are being paid to push it. Cellphones are sold with it preloaded. In one city southeast of Moscow, the municipal emergency loudspeaker belted out an exhortation to install it. Moscow is also pursuing a more subversive strategy to get Russians on the app. For weeks, the authorities have been sabotaging the two most popular alternatives, WhatsApp and Telegram, by impeding voice and video calls on those services in what the government called an “antifraud” measure. Calls made over MAX have remained crystal clear. The rollout of the new “super app” is the latest step by President Vladimir V. Putin to tighten control over what can be seen and said online in Russia. Mr. Putin, analysts say, is pushing to move Russians to what Moscow calls a “sovereign internet,” an online world cut off from Western technology and other foreign influences that is more susceptible to government censorship and control. “If you have a free internet where everyone can do what they want, for an authoritarian system that just doesn’t work,” said Philipp Dietrich, an expert on the Russian internet at the German Council on Foreign Relations. “So what you need to do is push users to domestic systems that you somehow can control.”
