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How Big Tech let down Navalny
Silicon Valley was meant to be a boon to the Russian opposition, helping spread democratic ideas. Until the platforms bowed before a Kremlin crackdown
And here we are, being left behind,” Ivan Zhdanov told my colleagues investigating the fallout of the Smart Voting story for “ Undercurrents: Tech, Tyrants and Us,” Coda’s podcast about the role of technology in the rise of global authoritarianism. This week, I caught up with Tanya Lokot and Marielle Wijermars, two internet policy scholars who specialize in the region, to ask their reflections on how things have evolved since that time, especially in the wake of Navalny’s death. “It may be a bit too deterministic to say that his team’s dependence on tech platforms was ‘their downfall,’” they wrote in a joint response, noting that Navalny’s organization had “accounted for the restrictions and possible censorship and built alternative infrastructures to support their work.” They also talked about how building this kind of resilience has become more difficult since the start of the war.
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