Unbreakable Internet in Russia

 The Lantern app will soon be fully operational in Russia. It cannot be shut down by governmental actors. But just as it can be used for good, don't be surprised when it also gets used by conspiracy theorists who eschew accountability.

Within the next week, the network will be fully operational, allowing opposition voices to use the Lantern app to post content like videos from protests or updates on the war in Ukraine directly to the Lantern network. This would allow users to share it with other Lantern users without fear that the content will be removed or blocked.

The amount of traffic passing through Lantern’s servers has risen 100,000% in the last four weeks according to the company, though it did not provide a baseline figure for comparison. Lantern said it would not break out country-level user numbers but told VICE News that globally the app has been downloaded 150 million times and has 7 million active monthly users, double the number it had three years ago.

The growth has been so rapid that Lantern says Russia this week surpassed China as its biggest market in terms of traffic, though China has been the company’s primary focus for years. 

The developers have spent years playing a game of cat-and-mouse with the Chinese censors who maintain the Great Firewall, Beijing’s highly sophisticated network of filters, bans, and blocks that prevent the free flow of information online.

And just like in China, the developers of Lantern don’t have a clue how so many people in Russia have begun using their app.

It’s just word of mouth,” Lantern co-founder Wolf told VICE News. “We still don’t know. There are over 150 million downloads [of the app] and we haven’t spent one cent on marketing. So we’ve no idea how it spreads.”

Wolf and Lucas, who have decades of experience building and scaling successful tech products, both use pseudonyms to protect their identities, fearing retaliation from the regimes in Beijing, and now Moscow, for helping people circumvent censorship.

“Now I have a window to the normal world from this prison called Russia,” one Russian user said this week in an email to Lucas.

As the so-called “Digital Iron Curtain” has closed in recent weeks, Russian users have scrambled to find ways around it. In the days and weeks after the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, downloads of the top virtual private network (VPN) apps on Apple and Google’s app stores spiked, CNN reported.