It is now 12:01 in Moscow. By this time, anti-corruption protests involving thousands of people have taken place in dozens of cities across the country. The geographic spread is unprecedented; rallies have been held even in cities where no protests had ever taken place before, even if some of them were small.
The authorities are making extraordinary efforts to intimidate those who have taken to the streets. Arrests are isolated, but OMON (riot police) and the National Guard are out in full force today.
And what will our wonderful Yandex system tell us about all this?
Trump, the U.S. Senate, Puerto Rico, Ukraine.
Guys at Yandex, aren’t you ashamed of this? Why are you destroying your own creation and turning it into a laughingstock? Yandex is one of the few achievements of post-Soviet Russia, and now are we supposed to stop being proud of that too?
I see some of you grumbling resentfully on Twitter, “Navalny wants to pick a fight with us too,” when I write that you have turned into “Pushkov-Inform”.
And how can I not quarrel with you, my dears, when you have literally turned Yandex News into an instrument for creating and spreading lies.
That is exactly what it is: the scale of your suppression of the news has turned silence into a lie.
And don’t tell us about the “law” and the “algorithm.” I can see that plenty of media outlets are writing about the protests right now, but they are not making it into your aggregator. That means you deliberately built the algorithm this way. And yes, it is an algorithm of lies. Fake news. You are deceiving millions.
Why are you doing this? I still believe you are above this. You do not want to make the world around you worse.