The two top companies in the world are coming under Putin’s rule, it seems. Friday morning, Bloomberg reports that Google and Apple have phased out Alexei Navalny’s main anti-voter app in the App Store and Google Play store in Russia. Workers told the companies to bow to the Kremlin’s pressure. Russia’s parliamentary elections begin today and end on Sunday.
Thursday, the Russian media house Tass reports that Vasily Piskarev, head of the Security and Anti-Fraud Committee, said Apple and Google have violated the law “by publishing competing weapons that have not been paid since the election.” A source told Bloomberg that officials were threatening to arrest Google’s Google employees.
Early Friday morning, Ivan Zhdanov, director of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), sent a message, apparently from Apple, citing the fact that manufacturers must comply with local regulations. This notice adds:
We note that the Office of the Prosecutor of the Russian Federation and the Office of the Prosecutor of the City of Moscow have also confirmed that the program violates the rules of the Russian Federation by causing them to disrupt elections.
It goes on to say that FBK and two other Navalny organizations “are known to be the most disruptive in the country.” In June, a Russian court ruled in favor of lawyers, to mention its “dangerous” networks. Following the ruling, the Russian online self-help group Roskomnadzor he is said to have been closed at least 42 pages of Navalny.
The app “Navalny,” he says run by the Navalny team, is currently available in the App Store and Google Play stores in the United States. Navalny’s “Smart Voting” tool seeks to cast voters in every state to round up an opponent.
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Users enter their address with the message “Find the one who wants to challenge United Russia,” and then prompt the competitor. (For example, in Moscow, it advises users to vote for a left-wing candidate for Yabloko.
Moscow Times they say that the government has cut off many “pages” related to Navalny and has tried to prevent people from joining the program. According to a press release, Navalny planned to release notifications of candidates “until the last minute,” after officials failed to remove them from the vote.
Navalny and her anti-corruption colleagues have faced online scrutiny throughout their travels. In 2014, the Kremlin knocked out the popular LiveJournal of Navalny blog outside. Russia has fined Google for refusal to block Selected pages based on search results and Twitter and Facebook without storing data at home.
“What do criminals do? Terrorists have taken people, “Navalny’s colleague Leonid Volkov said he wrote this morning.
Navalny was poisoned on a trip from Siberia to Moscow last year. He remains in prison, where he is to serve sentence of more than two years.
Apple and Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.