“Project” told how Russian officials convince Google to delete “compromised”
The publication “Project” published an investigation about how representatives of the Russian authorities, as well as businessmen and other influential persons, with the help of PR agencies, are trying to remove investigations, reports and news related to their activities from Google’s search results.
“Vladimir Putin’s close associates have many secrets that they are trying to hide from the citizens of their country. Through the efforts of investigators, many secrets got into the Internet, but they were skilfully removed from there by specialists hired by officials,” writes “Project”. According to the investigation, in the vast majority of cases, the authors of the complaints used the US law on copyright protection in the digital age to remove materials from search engines. To do this, hired PR staff created “retroactively” one-day websites where they posted the materials of investigations published in independent mass media, and then reported to Google that the investigations were allegedly stolen from little-known sites.
According to the publication, services for “cleaning up your reputation” or “creating a digital profile” cost from several million to several tens of millions of rubles. “removal of the negative, if you need to pay the media” is paid separately.
“Cleaning”, according to “Project”, in particular, companies “PremierMediaInvest” and Group-IB are engaged in. “PremierMediaInvest” was founded by Sergey Kolushev, whom journalists call a friend of Vladimir Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov, and Fyodor Shcherbakov, the son of the former press secretary of Sergei Shoigu, Maryna Ryklina. The company owns 24 small mass media, which publish almost identical “good” news about officials in order to bring them to the top of search engine results, the “Project” claims.
At the same time, Shcherbakov left Russia in the fall of 2023 due to a criminal case of extortion against the top manager of Rostec and the director of Rossetei, according to which his business partners were detained, and he himself was subsequently arrested in absentia. In July 2023, Group-IB founder Ilya Sachkov was sentenced to 14 years in a high-security prison in a high-treason case, which, it is claimed, does not prevent officials from using the services of his company.
Among the investigations, which tried to remove from Google search, materials about the entourage of Vladimir Putin, Igor Yusufov, Sergey Lavrov, Anton Siluanov, Vladimir Yevtushenkov. At least three investigations were removed from the search engine: the center’s “Dossier” about Rosgvardia director Viktor Zolotov’s vacation in the Seychelles, “Proekt” about the LDPR, as well as an article based on the investigation of Alexei Navalny by FBK about the head of Rosprirodnadzor Svetlana Radionova, in whose favor it was ruled court decision
Separately, “Project” writes that the head of the State Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, instructed his subordinates to “purge” from the Internet all the articles that started the rumors about his homosexuality and surrogate children. In particular, in 2003–2007, the mass media published “a whole cycle of articles unpleasant for the politician”, which contained direct hints about Volodin’s alleged homosexual orientation. According to the “Project”, Volodin tasked his subordinates to clean not only the originals, but also the remaining copies, as well as references to these articles from the Internet, he obtained through the court the recognition of some publications as defamatory and even punished their authors. So, the ex-adviser of the governor of the Saratov region, Eduard Abrosimov, received six months in prison for organizing the publication of the text “Don’t look into the keyhole”. As “Proekt” writes, “years later, Volodin’s strategy looks naive”, since from the point of view of the result of the appeal of specially hired agencies to Google, the alleged copyright violations turned out to be more effective.
