Big Tech, Propaganda, and Putin's War in German-Language Legacy Media: Yandex = Evil, but Google = 'Perfect'
An Amorality Tale of Hypocrisy, Double Standards, and Propaganda, in addition to many lies of omission and commission as well as free advertisement for corporate behemoth Google
Barely a handful of days ago, Austrian state broadcaster ORF Online (re)published a lengthy piece that originally appeared in the NTY. Entitled ‘How War in Ukraine Roiled Russia’s “Coolest Company’, both pieces—and a bunch of others scattered across the legacy media landscape in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland—are essentially propaganda.
Not that this is in and of itself somehow surprising in this day and age, but the most interesting aspect is not even the cavalier manner, if not outright borderline attitudes, in legacy media when it comes to reproducing content from other sources in an almost verbatim manner. (Something, if memory of Michael Eric Dyson’s MLK biography serves, preachers also do, but Mr. Dyson framed it as if what we in academia call ‘plagiarism’—and what should more properly be called ‘fraud’—would be something positive: if a fellow preacher copied your sermons, that’s because they are so good, hence it’s a good thing to do so, but I digress.)
Readers of these pages here know that I try to call a spade a spade, and while some of you may disagree with the way one or the other translation comes out (hat tip to jan van ruth), I hope that my analysis of these media pieces is of some value to you all outside the German language area.
Note, finally before we dive into the above-mentioned ORF Online piece, that this isn’t the first time the Austro-Covidian state broadcaster dabbled in the particularly shameful art of gaslighting. On a comparably anti-Russian piece, please see:
Unlike the article by one Mr. Körber, the piece at the heart of today’s posting does not have a dedicated author. Still, if you care, please read the original article by the NYT (linked above) and then ORF Online’s rendition below. As usual, I shall peruse the squared parentheses in the text and a few ‘bottom lines’ below the translated article to add context and commentary, respectively. As always, all emphases are mine, credit for all pictures and content, except when explicitly mentioned, belongs to the authors. Note that longer inserts by me are marked specifically by squared parentheses.
From Hip Start-Up to Propaganda Machine
The Russian counterpart to Google, Yandex, has developed from a start-up to a domineering position in about twenty years. The invasion of Ukraine changed everything for the formerly strongly westernised company. The Kremlin brought it strictly into line. And the war also brought Yandex to its knees economically.
‘What a difference a war makes’, the New York Times recently wrote in its story about the platform for which the world has been a different place since 24 February. Just a few months ago, Yandex stood out as one of the few great success stories in the Russian tech business. Merely months ago, it had a reputation of being ‘Russia’s coolest company’, with more than 18,000 employees, a market-value of $31 billion, and a growing user base in the rest of the world as well. ‘Then President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia invaded Ukraine.’
Yandex is fondly described as the Russian counterpart to Google, partly because the two companies are almost the same age and were also created similarly. [This is as stupid and inane an argument to make as ever; as ‘proof’ I offer the following thought experiment: just replace ‘Yandex’ and ‘Google’ with, e.g., ‘Stalin’ or ‘Hitler’ and ‘any other human born, by chance, on the same birthday’.] Arkady Volosh, Yelena Kolmanovskaya and Ilya Segalovich launched Yandex in 2000, around the same time that Sergei Brin and Larry Page invented Google [Note, in passing, that the NYT piece is even more accurate, as it holds that Yandex was ‘established as an internet search engine even before Google’…]. The Americans also wanted to swallow their Russian competitor soon, but Yandex rejected a takeover-they wanted to remain independent. The early 2000s were a time of seemingly endless growth for Yandex.
In colourful offices with flat hierarchies, the company developed into the thought leader of the Russian market. Yet, unlike Google, Yandex soon left the path of being a pure search engine [think about the above-cited quote from the Sermon of the Mount]. The site developed into the gateway to the internet for Russians [I’m so glad this isn’t the case with Google and its domineering, if not outright cartel-like, position within ‘Western’ society…]. With its app, you can order a taxi and also food, but the platform offers news and culture, videos, music, as well as cloud and streaming services. Everything that Google, Uber, Amazon, Spotify, and many more offer, Yandex combines on one platform, thus not only accumulating an enormous treasure trove of data, but also a 60% market share.
‘Dangerous Liaison with the Kremlin’
However, the beginning of the war [against Ukraine] was indeed the turning point for the company, which until then had been spoiled by success. Not only the management successively left the boat. Yandex was excluded from trading on the US stock exchange NASDAQ, and its share price plummeted by 75%. The sanctions imposed by the West caused foreign partners to flee [that’s one way of putting it; as a thought experiment, replace the word ‘foreign partners’ with ‘natural gas imports to the EU]. In fact, countless employees have also fled: about a quarter of its entire workforce has left Russia since February.
‘Today, the company is in a deep crisis into which it has manoeuvred itself’, says the Swiss online magazine Republik.ch [source here, the piece is entitled ‘Yandex—A Tech Company that Creates Zombies’ and appeared on 14 July 2022]. Yandex had entered into ‘a dangerous liaison with the Kremlin’ [Gee, I’m sooooooo glad ‘our’ Western corporate behemoths, such as Google, Apple, AT&T, and many, many others, would never-ever do that: shout-out to Edward Snowden and his disclosures that they do]. It had hoped for protection against Western competition, and there had also been political opportunism ‘to be left alone. The calculation did not work out’, according to Republik.ch.
Meet the Censors
The first repressive measures by the Kremlin had already crept in during the late 2000s, reported a former head of the news division Yandex News. He had received his first visit from Kremlin officials shortly before the Georgian war in 2008 [note that, according to an after-action report by the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Conflict in Georgia, which was financed by the EU, i.e., ‘the West’, the Georgian escalation in August 2008 came about when, ‘on the night of 7 to 8 August 2008, a sustained Georgian artillery attack struck the town of Tskhinvali’, but the Georgian troops were soon stopped by ‘a counter-movement [of] Russian armed forces’, with the quote on p. 10]. They had demanded that the news on the platform be approved before publication, and they had also demanded access to the Yandex News user interface.
In the years that followed, the Kremlin repeatedly tried to rein in Yandex. Sometimes the tech giant resisted, sometimes it buckled. The unwritten deal with the Kremlin, of which Yandex is accused by critics, was [see how easy it is to gaslight anyone: it’s unwritten—the original holds that this was a ‘unausgesprochener Deal’, i.e., there’s no paper trail, but the Kremlin certainly leaned on, and influenced, Yandex: in the Russian case, that’s of course ‘evil’, while, if ‘we’ do it, it’s o.k.: the Nixon Conundrum in action, again]: the state creates favourable conditions for the company, which then must no worry about competition regulators, who—unlike in the EU, for example—do not keep an eye on the de facto monopoly. In return, the platform only brings news that plays into Putin’s hands.
[This is too absurd not to comment on more extensively: there’s now three major antitrust cases against Google in the EU—for precisely the same actions Yandex stands accused of but, ‘unlike in the EU’, nothing is done about…even the Ministry of Truth™ has a long entry about it; see here, e.g., for the record US$2.8 billion fine Google was slapped with in 2017; and, if you’re in a cheerful mood, you may also scroll and click through the Ministry of Truth’s™ ‘List of largest pharmaceutical settlements’ and compare both listings with the settlements and fines against ‘other’ big corporations, as compiled by the Harvard Law School. If you do this, remember, though, Google = ‘Good’, but Yandex = ‘Evil’, because Putin.]
Strict Internet Laws
In 2016, the Duma also passed strict internet laws that require control by Kremlin officials. For example, news sites that have more than one million readers per day are obliged to only display ‘licensed’ media. Internet companies have been obliged to store their users’ data and messages for a period of six months and, if necessary, hand them over to the ‘appropriate government authorities’. The laws are so strict that even the Communist Party (CP) protested against them at the time.
[It’s a shame that no such party or protest has been given such a public voice when Ed Snowden came forward in 2013, eh? To their credit, the US is doing the blanket surveillance mainly outside the constraints of the legal system, hence it’s also quite impossible to actually have such ‘strict’ laws, right?]
After the invasion of Ukraine, Putin once again stepped up the clampdown on freedom of expression and signed more laws against alleged ‘fake news’ about the Russian armed forces and state organs abroad. The penalties range up to imprisonment.
[Wasn’t there a term for calling out someone while doing virtually the same yourself, Ms. Nina Jankowicz?]
News is Curated Daily
Today, Sergei Kiriyenko, the Russian government’s deputy chief of staff, ‘curates’ the news published on Yandex. Putin himself has the five most important Yandex news items put on his desk every day, according to research by Republik.ch. The control of the news is hard to circumvent, as tech entrepreneur Tonia Samsonova told the Russian exile medium Meduza: Samsonova had sold her own start-up to Yandex years ago and continued to run it.
[What is Meduza, you might at this point ask: it’s a long and convoluted story, which begins with alleged funding by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, one of Russia’s leading oligarchs of the 1990s who had the ‘misfortune’ to disagree with Mr. Putin about who should lead the country; the current CEO of oil company ‘Yukos’, Mr. Khodorkovsky is serving a prison term, but continues to fund virtually anything and everyone who’s against Putin, incl. Alexey Navalny and—Meduza, as a 2016 ‘history’ of the news company tells us: while the funding scheme ultimately fell through, Mr. Khodorkovsky and one of his associates ultimately paid US$ 250,000 each for ‘failed negotiations’: they’re either crappy negotiators—or the payment is, well, ‘dubious’, to say the least.
Founder and Editor-in-Chief Galina Timchenko, in a 2014 interview with Forbes (Russia), merely said she found ‘other investors’ without adding more details. I find this fishy, to say the least, and hardly credible: Meduza lost 160,000 € in 2014 alone, followed by losses worth 1.13m € in 2015, which said (unnamed) investors apparently paid without batting an eyelid or asking for anything in return. Curiously enough, as reported by Thomas Röper (but without adding sources), Meduza functions like a funnel, or transmitter, for ‘news items’ (propaganda) that the US-funded Radio Liberty publishes, hence Meduza appears—to me, quite plausibly so, spreading pro-Western (US) propaganda in Russian, hence, at least in part, the curious instances of ‘mystery’ investments by ‘silent partners’.
Finally, and equally absurd, Mr. Khodorkovsky, who’s been in prison a variety of tax charges, was ultimately pardoned by none other than Mr. Putin in 2013. A founder of ‘Open Russia’, Mr. Khodorkovsky is currently residing in London, UK, and tries frantically to (me, it seems) get back at Mr. Putin. Hence he twice filed suits with the European Court of Human Rights alleged that the tax charges that resulted in his imprisonment were politically motivated; note, however, that the ECHR shot down both of Mr. Khodorkovsky’s claims in 2011, as reported by, e.g., the Hamburger Abendblatt, and as recent as in 2020; for the latter court ruling, see here.]
When Putin put the country’s nuclear forces on high alert a few days after the invasion of Ukraine, e.g., there was nothing on Yandex News about it, except a report by the state news agency TASS that the army’s ‘deterrence forces’ had been put on high alert. There was no mention of nuclear weapons. By text message, she [Samsonova] asked those responsible at Yandex to inform people about this, and promptly received a rebuff. Samsonova then wrote a letter of resignation and published it on Instagram.
On WhatsApp, she also wrote to her father in Moscow, as [Samsonova] told Meduza. ‘My father didn’t seem as worried as I was. After all, he didn’t know that Russian troops were shelling Ukraine; he didn't believe anything was happening at all’, Samsonova said. ‘The TASS headline, which was one of the top five news items on the Yandex website, gave no indication that there was a threat of nuclear war. I realised there was nothing I could do to convince my father, if [Yandex] was just his only news source."
There is No ‘War’
The word ‘war’ does not exist in the Yandex bubble, just as it does not exist in Kremlin parlance [or in the Yugoslav/Servian and Libyan ‘interventions’ either]. There are no reports of alleged Russian war crimes, not a word about the shelling of kindergartens and hospitals in Ukraine [I’m waiting for someone to report on that: Wikileaks, where art thou?]. Some of the former bosses who went abroad and left Yandex repeatedly tried to shake up their former staff. Former manager Lev Gershenson, for example, regularly posts critical articles and addresses Yandex directly.
On 1 March, Gershenson wrote on Facebook: ‘Today is the sixth day of the war between Russia and Ukraine, when residential areas of Kharkiv, hostels, and maternity clinics are shelled with rockets and volley fire systems. Eleven dead, dozens injured. Today is the sixth day that at least 30 million Russian users see on the main Yandex page that there is no war, there are no thousands of dead Russian soldiers, there are no dozens of civilians killed by Russian bombing, there are no dozens of prisoners, there is no major destruction in various Ukrainian cities.’ The fact that ‘a significant part of the population of Russia may believe that there is no war is the basis and the driving force of this war. Yandex is now a key element in hiding information about the war.’
[Note that the ORF Online piece links to these postings, but I won’t see them as I’m blocking Instagram’s and Facebook’s tracking cookies, hence the translation is from the media item and might differ slightly from the originals.]
Every day of such ‘news’ costs human lives, Gershenson said. According to Meduza, Gershenson’s intervention was hotly debated in the Yandex offices [lawyers and judges might call that kind of information ‘hearsay’]. However, CEO Elena Bunina had told her employees that resistance to the Kremlin was futile: ‘If we remove the news, we will reap ten minutes of fame. On a global level, nothing will change, and when the ten minutes are up, everything will be the same as before, only Yandex will be gone’, she is quoted Meduza as saying.
But in April, even Bunina resigned from her position and moved to Israel. ‘Yandex used to be like an island of freedom in Russia, and I don’t know how that will continue’, Bunina said, according to the New York Times.
Yandex News is Sold
After Russia banned Western news competition, Yandex’s user numbers soared even higher. After the departure of Apple, Microsoft, and others [Western companies] from Russia, Yandex now all but dominates the market. Nevertheless, the company is doing miserably: Western sanctions not only directly affected some of those responsible in the company, they also reduced the value of Yandex by billions overnight [do they? Last time I checked, it’s the EU and other Europeans that are suffering, and will be shivering due to the lack of gas come autumn and winter]. Branches and business partners abroad closed their doors, future prospects look dim. At the end of June, according to Republik.ch, almost 2,800 vacant Yandex positions were advertised.
Recently, Yandex decided to sell its news division and the blogging platform Yandex Zen. The buyer is VK, the Russian equivalent of Facebook, led by Vladimir Kiriyenko, the son of the government’s deputy chief of staff. It is said that the company wants to concentrate on technological products in the future. Within the company, the news of the sale is said to have led to a collective sigh of relief.
Insurmountable Divisions
The sale should not hurt the Kremlin either, especially since control over news content on VK will now become easier. Moreover, this month the Kremlin fined Google a total of US$ 380m for violation of competition rules. In parallel, Russia has been tinkering with its own internet for years: With ‘Runet’, the country is to be digitally separated from the rest of the world, similar to what is already happening in North Korea with ‘Kwangmyong’ [see, it’s easy to place Russia and North Korea in the same context, thereby inferring that all the bad and nasty and outright evil stuff either do unto the other]. It remains to be seen what will happen to Yandex.
Ilya Krasilshchik, who left Yandex after the publication of pictures from Bucha, told the New York Times that the gap between satisfying the needs of the Kremlin and those of Western partners is insurmountable [unüberwindbar]. ‘They need to find a way between these two, and it is kind of impossible’, Krasilshchik said. [Curiously, ORF Online emphasises the ‘insurmountable’ aspect, which isn’t what Mr. Krasilshchik said.] ‘In any other situation, it would be a perfect company like Google or any other tech company. But Yandex has the problem of being a Russian company.’
Bottom Lines
Another day in the anti-Russian propaganda war in an ostensibly neutral country.
Note the gaslighting—propaganda—that emphasises, from start to finish, that Google is a ‘perfect company’, as opposed to Yandex, which is ‘evil’ because of the Kremlin’s undue, if not outright malevolent, influence.
In addition, the anti-Russian slant is palpable: it’s bad enough for Yandex to be ‘evil’ due to its association with the Kremlin, but it’s also a Russian company (my emphasis), which, of course, renders its doubly ‘unworthy’ in the sense explained by Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky.
Hence, the last words today are:
Judge not, that ye be not judged.
For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.
And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?
Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.
Sermon of the Mount, Matthew 7:1-5 (KJV)
Well, using the word "Ivermectin" even when referencing official UN reports of the 25 year long pan-African campaign involving over 20 nations, or speculating about stolen elections has been virtually impossible in many places the latest years. Strange, because speculating about if Al Gore was robbed when he ran for US presidency wasn't a problem back then. Not even on the frontpage of the WaPo.
Hypocrisy never goes out of style it seems.
What's funny about Google is that their old slogan was "Don't be evil", which was changed in 2015 to "Do the right thing". For someone like me, who he is quite at home in the quicksands of semantics and poststrucuralism, this is a virtual goldmine of interpretations and deep readings. It shows a 180 degrees turn for the company. Not being evil only takes not doing evil, such as partisan bias, censorship, rigged search algorithms and the like: the prime example in later years being when Google only gave american negroes top billing when people searched for invntors and scientists - Hitler and Himmler both would be so proud to see their ideas of racially grounded scientism used by the americans.
Do the right thing is an order, or at least strong encouragement. It requires action. Directed, targeted, and with a specific defintion of right and thing (and do too, really). I effect, it seems to mean "Obey", another brand by the way.
"Often, companies with an outlandish market share or questionable business practices -- such as tax avoidance or a desire to change their business practices without notifying their customers -- endlessly promote their good intentions, their world-saving and community-driven business models. Or, as in the case of Google, having such a morally upright motto can leave you open to criticisms of hypocrisy." Forbes online edition; 2018-01-05.
Or as many have noted, if the used-car salesman has to put "Honest" in his name and slogan, how honest can he be?
In the current media landscape, I'll often notice creation of new terms, and then convergence of their use. For example, here in Germany, the war in Ukraine is almost always being referred to as "der russische Angriffskrieg" (the Russian aggressive war - maybe to signal that, should the West start a war, it would only be a preventive one).