Alexei Navalny’s speech at the Internet Freedom Conference

Hello, my name is Alexei Navalny.

Thank you very much for inviting me here.

And I realized what YouTube will look like

when it gets banned: we’ll gather in a

hall on Saturday morning and watch a 40-

minute video projected on the wall. Actually,

I want to start by saying that I

lost an argument to Leonid Volkov, because

of course I said that your entire

internet conference would be broken up to hell

and back. It’s strange that it hasn’t been shut down, although

well, maybe by the end of my

speech I’ll still win that argument

and people will come in who refuse

to obey. What was your formula there with

"Be nice to others!"

All the more so since I see here

Sveta coming in with her dangerous

Instagram too.

Same thing — completely impermissible at the present

time. While listening to Volkov, with these

three

three formulas, I realized that actually

in a certain sense, they apply

to the internet the same way they do to a dangerous person,

and in that sense, a conference on the defense

of the internet is somewhat like a conference on the

defense of political prisoners — exactly the

same thing. The formula is roughly the same:

first they try to buy a person,

then they try to intimidate the person,

intimidate them,

then they try to imprison the person. They

always act this way, with everyone. And with

the internet, it looks like this mechanism

works too. And

Sergei Boyko, speaking here, said that

all the speakers who follow should

try to answer the question of what

is happening, what really

defines the point we’re at

and understand what to do next. But the point

we’re at, it seems to me,

is that our romantic notions

from 2011 about

how, with the help of the internet, we would now

flatten the whole regime here — those ideas, of course,

obviously didn’t work. We saw that

the mechanism of buying people off worked insanely well.

They simply went out and bought up all the

mass media on the internet. They

just bought them. They didn’t torment anyone there,

didn’t torture anyone, didn’t twist anyone’s arms — it didn’t even get

to intimidation. They simply went and

bought them. All those once completely

wonderful outlets — Lenta.ru, Gazeta.ru, and so

on. Now we really do have

very few free media outlets

on the internet. The ones that

do exist are usually small, operate

from abroad, and in any case they’re

fighting for survival. It’s very, very hard for them.

I don’t want to take up much of your

attention. I’d rather draw it

to what needs to be done.

First.

It seems to me that what I’d like to address

specifically to the Society for the Defense of the Internet is this: we

desperately need a giant

I hope you will become a giant

lobbying organization that defends

the internet right now from the good people who

are breaking it. Help me out — who are those cool,

very pleasant, sweet people whom, from a

political point of view, you now very much

support, but who are badly breaking the Russian internet? Well, those cool

ones we all love. No, but they’re bad

people. The State Duma and the authorities are bad people; we

hate and despise them. But the good people —

that’s impossible. And yet they’re among you, they’re here,

in any case, they’re cool.

The company Yandex — they’re cool, we all

love them, they’re great, they’re like us. We

are them, they are us. But who created the main

instrument of lies — in fact the most widely used

one right now? What’s it called — Yandex News.

Yandex News and United Russia (the ruling political party), Yandex...

Yandex News is now the main, most widespread

instrument — far more widespread than

Vladimir Solovyov’s program. No one

watches it; nobody needs it, nobody

needs it. And RT (Russia Today)

— because they lie endlessly — no one else

watches them. But everyone reads Yandex News,

and the censorship in Yandex News is

precisely a colossal

instrument of lies, created by cool, very

pleasant and sweet,

normal people who always vote against

United Russia. How did that happen?

Hell if I know. It seems to me that for this

we need a lobbying structure that, first

and foremost, deals with the good people. Well, the bad

people won’t listen; you can’t persuade them.

But the good people can probably be

made to be at least a little

smarter. After all, Yandex

— it’s clear they were forced to make this algorithm

very strange, one that leads

to the result that Russia’s top news story is always

“Senator Pushkov commented...”

But they’re smart people; surely they could have

done something additional,

something clever — I don’t know — built into their famous

algorithm, included something so that the news

would look at least a little more like the truth,

right? They are smart. And so it seems to me that one

of the tasks of the Society for the Defense of the Internet

is to unite literally millions of people. Everyone

wants to defend the internet. Anastasia

Ivleeva asks Medvedev a question about

the internet, about YouTube — that has the

support of absolutely everyone. They need to be

brought together, including so that, first

and foremost, pressure can be put on the good

ones — on Yandex, on all domestic IT people —

and tell them to stop and to help.

Stop helping the ghouls on your own initiative.

Stop helping the ghouls like that.

Stop diligently helping the ghouls, but if they

force you to do something, then let

it break, let it not get done

as well as you know how. That’s the first thing.

And the second thing is more practical. Here you

have various different sections and groups.

And I was thinking that what’s needed is something

that perhaps you could initiate,

something invented and created so that

the internet, including the internet

necessary for normal

political development in Russia, so in order

to answer the question, let’s

look at this wonderful

young man in the white shirt.

This is Alexander Plyushchev. What is

Alexander Plyushchev doing together with his

colleague Michael Nacke, with whom he hosts broadcasts?

They host streams where they rather greedily collect

donations, and we all need to make sure

that they collect more donations and

earn more money. Why? Because

that is the point the state will strike at

most of all right now. They

understand that the internet is huge; in it

you can make money, and in it you can become

independent of the state, and that simply

drives them crazy—that there are some guys

who put a computer in their home and say things there

without asking anyone’s permission. It really infuriates them.

And that’s why they

you see,

the whole campaign against BK is built mainly on

this. They are trying to cut off

any ways of legally receiving money,

making payments, functioning at all in

some sense. Probably the actions

of the authorities

will lead to a situation where in a couple of years we

will all become quite sophisticated

guys and girls in the field of

cryptocurrency, and we’ll learn to use it

better, because they will

push us out of normal money. But I

just want to say that, as it seems to me,

now is a good time for

journalism, now is a good time for

making content.

Now is a good time to

earn money on the internet independently of the state,

but mechanisms are needed. That is,

in any case, if you earn money, you

have to receive some money and put

it in your pocket. Alexander Plyushchev and Michael

Nacke should, I don’t know, buy all the airplanes,

a yacht, and sail off somewhere racing each other.

In a race.

That’s the only way this works. So I’m simply

calling on your community

to devote serious attention to this. We

must—the state is pressuring users and

trying to squeeze them out and make them

destitute,

make them poor, make them

illegal. We need to invent methods such that

a person in Moscow,

a person in Tatarstan, or a blogger from Chechnya

can live normally and earn money,

earn, develop, have a large

audience, and do it in such a way

that the state cannot

crack down on them. It’s quite difficult, but only

this is the future. If you and I do not

manage to invent such a system,

set it up, and truly make it

mass-scale, it will of course take some time,

then the political internet is doomed

to slide into marginality. But we

of course will not let that happen. The last

thing I want to say, and from what

Leonid was saying, about the prospects

awaiting us from the point of view of the state’s offensive,

I would say this is my

personal forecast, looking, by the way, at our

latest video about Asker-zade and Kostin

on Kosmo.

Raise your hands—I’m just curious.

Excellent. That’s where donations were coming in.

I think that starting next year

all internet censorship will proceed under the

slogan of protecting privacy. Look,

not long ago our latest

investigation by my Rostov headquarters

was blocked by YouTube because

there were complaints about the inviolability of private

life. Any corruption investigation,

any claims against officials, one way or another,

can and will be framed as violations of their private

life, because showing their

photographs, photographs of their children,

their yachts, steamships, newspapers, and so on—this

will all supposedly count as private life.

So I expect

a legal offensive precisely

along these lines: you must not, absolutely must not,

you must not talk about Kostin and Asker-zade,

and you must not show private

life because it does not concern you.

Please: no faces, no children,

no passport numbers, no

names of offshore companies, and so on, and so on.

And so it seems to me that we need

right now simply to understand in advance that this

is coming and prepare for it, because all

of this will be done under the slogan, under the

pretext that, well, this is already how it’s done in Europe,

this is already how it’s done in the U.S., and so on.

Thank you very much. That’s all I wanted to say.

But in closing, I just want once again

to thank you for inviting me.

It’s great that you exist, it’s great that you

haven’t been dispersed, it’s great that for now

the state does not understand that the people

gathered here represent

a much greater danger to it even than those

who took to the streets of Moscow in the summer.

Well, as I understand it, it was you, and you...

have gathered here, and in the end

the internet will win anyway, and therefore

in a way, I am at a congress of future

winners. Thank you very much.

[applause]

[music]