fiber. . our team broke speed barriers, delivered one gig speeds to every customer, has led the way in developing a 10 g platform, and with mediacom mobile is offering the most reliable network on the go. mediacom, tickets of delivery, decades ahead. >> mediacom supports c-spaas a public service along with these other television providers, giving you a front row seat to democracy. new york times columnist and others talked about russian society and the state of journalism there. they address independent journalist use of social media and russia's relationship with the new trump administration. the george washington university elliott school of international affairs hosted the one-hour event. everyone. yes, very thanks for joining us

this night. my name is greg. i'm the director of the russia program at the george washington university and it's really great to see so many people here, too, who's interested in understanding russian society and how we can use media to address the contemporary changes that are going on on the regime is probably swift. and so it's something to tell. entering right now. so today i'm pleased to. welcome you to the old school for a talk on the unique insight offered by the russian in the independent media archive, which is a groundbreaking data set that captures the rolling landscape of russia's so far semi-closed society by preserving and then aligning the work, independent journalists rima russian independent media archive reveals social trends, cultural shifts and political pressures in the environment shaped by increasing and autocracy. let's call it. that's for now. so today we will be exposed to

this great work of the team who is with us and first of all, i would like to welcome mckesson. they are the author of the of 12 books, including most recently published surviving autocracy, the national book award winning winning the future is history held still, tyrannies reclaimed russia and the man without a face likely in. unlike the rise of literary putin. so getting lived in russia. 1992 to 2013 and now you're an opinion columnist of the new york times and the recipient of numerous awards, including guggenheim and carnegie fellowships, i guess. and is this distinguished professor at city university of new york, craig newman, a graduate school of journalism and a visiting writer at bard college. so next with us today, we have an anonymous who's a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker studying the memory of

wars in the post-soviet. she's a presenter on tv, also known as tv or in and formerly the only independent channel in russia and now working in exile. so anna is a scholar at barnard college, the united states and a co-founder of the russian independent media archive and dedicated the preservation of all of russian independent, independent media as important evidence of the era and we're happy to welcome we have an african who is a historian and journalist for 15 years he has been studying stalinist culture and subjectivity year old, an e-book masters in a soviet writer inside the great purge and co-founder co-founded project a dot org, a collaborative online of soviet diaries legal documents. he's a co-founder of the russian independent media archive, a scholar at bard college and is writing a book on the ideology of putinism. so let's welcome our great panel

today. so i think we're ready to begin the presentations almost. we just down for mike mike still don't have a stand. do you want to pass along know that? i think that's a great idea. i was just holding the mike soliciting so it looks like an interview that oh, am am i your first. yes. okay in that guess i'm going first. i so when i was actually this was a little bit aren't a lot to do the presentation of remote so first uh okay it's just a mean if you think that's that's more appropriate do it this way. yeah let's let's start with a yeah like yeah sorry. okay.

first of all. no, we just you do you come and show the slides. i think. okay. so my task will be very to give you a just an understanding of what the russian independent media archive at the moment so that we can just continue or talk. second. oh, okay. so just if we need to describe the main purpose of the project just in the this way possible. so we are here just to preserve the work that the russian independent journalists have been doing for more. 20 years and to create the archives is just open that is free that is as exhaustive as possible so but that's not at

all our only goal because i would say that we have a mission that is threefold. so the first of all, we are preserving in the legacy of the independent journalism and then we try to use the technology to give voice to this data. so and are happy to use different ways of i data science to amplify the legacies that we have because. we know that right now we have just tremendous possibility using the articles that we have as a dataset and the next step that we have on our mission, the idea of empowering other groups of journal is communities of activists, ngos and so on with the tools that we create because. so our ultimate goal is not just to create the archive, but to be able to share t tools and resources as we create with

other communities. so right now at the mont, we are in the process of launching the central american independent media archive. that will be just based on the infrastructure that we created because our understanding that different autocracies, they have very common traits and they have common problems and if something is useful and is in need, the community of russian journalists, it's highly likely that the journalists from other countries facing censorship and autocracy might benefit from using the same tools and goal is just to just to make our mistakes and to scale something that that has benefit of not being full of these mistakes. and so in that case, we are open to your partnership, to you as institution and to share this mission and vision because ultimately we hope to the work of communities.

so what we have right now, just think of that as an archive we are still a work in progress. so right now what i want 131 media outlets and seven and a half million documents. and so we have in the archive so the major part of the just the most influential are russian independent media. but this work is accomplished yet so and we soon we're going to have more right now for the use teaching and research have a used machine translation to translate all the articles into english so that if you have students working with that so they do not need to, you know, russian to interact with this dataset and we also, like used basic properties for, for search and some filters and are we going to just implement more

filters to enrich the possibilities of source and working with the dataset than we the things that we started recently is that we started adding the archive, the paper media are not available online. and so there's is a process of digging into the legacy of first journalism because many just crucially outlets are now in print and our task is to digitize them and to help them to dataset, just to recognize all the text and be able to just pull them in the dataset that is unified. right now. and just if you're a researcher just, you can just enter, just your request and we'll be happy to provide you with the dataset that will be tailored to your needs so that you can just do the research that you're doing

and that is like something that we have in the nearest future. so we are not just so that's the plan for, for this year. so because we're going to have just more outlets, we got introduce the of by video and audio and for blue work that was podcasts. we also are planning to add the media from social networks like telegram and instagram because some part of russian independent media we will add more printed outlets into the archive. we start just adding some never published materials such as personal archives of journal is done. the editorial teams because it's just some legacy that was never released and we hoping to launch the remote research and teaching. yeah assistant that i will tell a few words about just in a second.

so this is the one that we are hoping to launch soon. we invite you, so if you're interested, then you can join just our efforts to help us tailor that to your needs. so what is a remote research assistant? so that is the chat board that relies on the our dataset, our database so it has only the information from russian independent media and it gives you the possibility to you just interact in a real life dialog mode, just asking everything that you need, just as you are talking to you and getting the links to the original materials from the archive so that just you can be sure that there is a minimal risk of hallucinations of air. so that you so you can double check and. so we believe that for, for many purposes that can an easy way just to access just the precise information so obviously that it

cannot substitute to research itself what it just can be useful just to and just understand and the context in writing articles. and so on. so just for example, here, just on the screen asking the child, what about the presidential election of donald trump and the it affected the peace negotiator in ukraine and so it like its structure that so is saying, yes, there was some peace plan, there is negotiation strategy. and the response from the ukrainians side. and the thing is that so this child border is regularly updated. so because the newest information possible and just you can work with that but once again we will be happy to just collaborate with the community of experts and the researchers. teachers do you find teens is chessboard to use a special user cases so we better understand your needs and try to provide the best can.

but all of this wouldn't be possible if not for the support of a large coalition government centered party college pen america and our collaborators from internet archive and wayback machine and mass media defense center. so and i believe that's just the biggest story of the work that we're doing. so thank you. and there you go. next right? yeah, do it. okay. thank you. okay, so when preparing into this discussion, i was in thinking about, like, some key assumptions is a dictatorship russia presented to the whole world an example of dictatorship that doesn't remain within own borders, that affects the whole world, or a big part of world.

therefore russia has to be studied and and well. and today all woke up and the world where we are expected to believe that usaid funded aid and the spread of covid and so the idea of understanding and studying russia and all these key assumptions don't seems so obvious. but still, i'll try to to do it. how how was how i was still thinking i might do it just a second and maybe i'll maybe everything i'll say it will seem like bragging because a russian independent journalist, honestly, i'm talking only about colleagues and i just i'll try to say a few words about the context because russians have

been journalists who've been working for, okay, let's say 24, 25 years. they were working in, said very interesting infrastructure because. i think that. yeah, i think that by. 2004 on the putin's first term, he already built the whole infrastructure for the dictator ship. it might look like a democracy, he might pronounce all the right words till the 2007 and he's famous speech in munich world might have illusions but on his first term he did everything to make sure that the dictatorship is possible. it it is about the parliament,

which was totally under his control by 2001. it was it was about judicial system, which was under his control. by 2001, it was about the elections of governors and the executive power which was under his control by 2004. and this was the the infrastructure and we saw the institution being demolished and andrew and and so on. and at the same time repression, independent journalists due to their incredible stubbornness continued working. and at some point it it started to remind us of arms race because it was a constant process when putin for instance

took under control of the television and made it his own propaganda tool and russian independent turned to internet journalism to use journalism. then when he started, like, i'm really explaining in describing it really quick and maybe it's pretty obvious, but it's just important me to to underline and to draw the big picture. he started to block websites and on they turned to social media to every different every other ways to to spread the information he taking under control the news media. okay started they began to yeah to launch their investigative media or social social direction

and media and so on and it was really important because at some point i don't i don't think i can say that russian independent journalism remained the only working institution in russia. my maybe this might be an exaggeration, but something like that and russia independent journalist become not only journalists, but they had. they had another fast one, which was very important and at some point it was something that human activists usually do. they started the document nation. and we know that from time to time the actual human rights activists doing their incredible job every day. they just didn't have time to to to to write everything down to

make sure archives are okay, to make sure everything is documented. and so russian journalists began their work in this direction and somehow this archive now is kind of historical record and we can just we and we can. we can find approximately all. all the period of putin's regime. we can find it in the archive, documented and, described in different we can find the history of legislative crackdown. we can find their record of political repressions and on we can it's it's an example which is it's about nowadays and it is

really important because only russian journalist russian journalist some time from time to time they have an access to russian military guys who fought in ukraine and time to time these military guys agree to with the russian journalists and we get incredibly important information and we well, somehow we understand how it works. and what these people have been through. and what do they think and how this mechanics work and what make what made them go there and what what their experience. just the second. and of course, we can we can observe the whole line, the whole history of our censorship and propaganda because at this point, russian dependent

journalists become at the same time the narrator of this story. but at the same time are subject their own observation. and it is really important. and so starting the archive, we were thinking you mentioned actually the three girls of our three, our three steps of our mission. so our mission first step is just to preserve, just to make sure this archives don't disappear here because we know that websites are being blocked and archives are being are disappearing. and so our first goal was just to preserve. our second goal was to make this archive speak, not to let it remain silent and just sit over the in the dust waiting for for the future to come because. the day i think the preserving

would be good enough itself. but we wanted to to make a little bit more just a little bit more. we wanted this archive to be like present and yeah, described one of our tools which is used by, which can be used by journalists and researchers but at the same time we make sure to, we make sure to produce media projects that speak during now with their help, with the help of these media project, the archive can speak and can tell the story. we are trying to use technical tools, the air tools to make it speak and to make it, to make it tell the story of how it all. because i think at this point we all can. we all are asking ourselves the question how we became possible.

so i know it seems to me understanding of how it all became possible, maybe painful, but it is necessary. and i don't know anything about the avoiding mistakes in the future, but i'm always voting for researching, for studying, for understanding and so i think and hope the archive with our help, with the help of media projects, of our technical tools, might be well, might provide some assistance in this direction. i'll match the is yours. thank you. thank you. so i'm going to put it in bigger language to this mission and i have the strange experience of

having written about russia for several decades now in two languages and and not only do i write in two languages in russia and english, but i also have used sources always in both languages. and one thing that happens and i'm sure, this is the experience of many people in this room read one thing that happens if you're studying russia and using both russian and english language sources is you realize that especially when you're talking about soviet history, there's a real lack of language in russian. there's there's a real lack of the language, the sense of as a tool of self-interest. it the basically in order to write about the soviet period, you have to rely on foreign researchers who had hugely imperfect information, but they had the advantage of having analytical language and

analytical language that was worked out collaboratively and all we have to rely on for the soviet period for russian language sources are individual accounts. there's nothing that sort of gets worked out collaboratively. there's there's incredible contempt parade chronicles, personal journals there. there's a little bit of underground publishing, but there's almost no there's almost none of the staying that is so essential for understanding a society, which is how we talk about ourselves, how we come to understand ourselves, what we call ourselves right? do we call this a totalitarian regime? do we call this a dictatorship? do we call this do we call this thing censorship and this thing something else in journalism is, as the cliche goes, first draft

of history. but journalism is also always the first draft of this language. it is. it's because journalism is something that is actually fundamentally collaborative. it's we work out a journalistic language. we work out a way of portraying reality on a on a daily basis. we work out ways to refer the things that we're observing, often hugely imperfect ways, but it's still a language. it's still a tool of self-understanding. and i think we started rima we this is primary thing that we're trying to preserve, right? we're obviously trying to preserve documents we're trying to preserve facts. but the biggest thing that we're trying to preserve is set of tools, self-understanding, this language that gets worked out and as i mentioned incredibly almost america's independent

journalism has survived against all odds in very diminished way. and obviously, there's no way to talk about independent journalism in russia without acknowledging just how how how much journalism has been damaged by censorship and how much journalism has been damaged in the last now almost three years by basically having to entirely go into exile. and i think russian journalists working exile have have invented incredible tools for being able to report on something that is on the face of it, impossible to report. they're trying to primarily report on a war to which they have zero physical access. they don't have physical access to the country waging the war and they don't have the physical access to the country that is subjected to the war. and yet they have done extraordinary they have done sustained coverage, and they have most remarkably reported

things that only russian journalists in that would be able to report, like, for example, journalists in exile have been able to get russian military personnel to confess to war crimes on camera. this is something that only a russian journalist have been able to do. and yet russian independent is limited, is diminished by being unable to function in any way in russia and by having to work from exile. and these outlets in exile are also often always separated from one another. and i think that that's another reason why it's so valuable to be able to look at the material that rima collected as as a collection. but we're creating the kind of collaboration that is missing in real life.

people are not talking each other often. often, even the the individual media outlets are distributed. they have staff, for example. tv iran has on a in new york has has a sort of hub in amsterdam, has people working still in riga, in latvia, has people working in belarusian has people in berlin. and so that's, you know, the kind of soup that that is journalism, the kind of interpersonal and professional communication is almost lacking. it's not entirely lacking, but it's again, hugely diminished. and so all the more valuable is an opportunity to analyze russian independent journalism as a whole. before i see the florida questions, i want to do the obvious thing, which is to relate this to what's happening

in this country now that in the last two weeks we have seen in the disappearance of information on a scale that we hadn't even seen, i mean, at this rate, on the scale we never saw russia the just to name a few things that have happened. right. we have seen federal remove information. we've seen the white house remove information we've seen the cdc remove information. we've seen the cdc recall articles that had already been submitted for publication. and we have seen universities much less visibly remove information. for example, universities have been removing information about programs from their websites. we have seen hospitals all over the country remove information about trans care and and this is

obvious, something that's important that we're seeing the products of research are being removed. we're seeing facts being disappeared. but what i want to point out is we're also seeing exactly that that i was talking about as societies tools of self understanding, being deleted in real time. and when we talk about preserve the information that's being removed, that's the thing that we should be thinking about preserving because when this period is over, as it will be, both here and in russia, to be able to understand happened, we have to have that language. we have to have those tools. think it's so much i mean, well, where discussing u.s. and russia in the same context. hey wow great. so we have about.

2025 minutes for questions so we have a mic there. so probably we'll pick three in a row. so please raise your hands. to a kind of. jill dougherty, is this working you turn it up. oh, there it's. it doesn't compute. sorry. when do you want to. onto one. thank you. okay. i hope it's russian. it's not really much each. well, i'm holding it pretty. i'm okay. thank you. this is any day, america. i thank you very much jill

dougherty from georgetown university. and i have a number of my students here. you know, i have a question that in the context of what was just which is i think very deep, this seems like a primitive question, but i'll ask it anyway. three years ago, after people a lot of journalists, russian, began fleeing russia, i was in the baltics and i talked with a number of people and remember, you know their reactions and the i had was if you were of russia, i think you know where i'm going to go. can you really understand what's going on and can talk to your fellow russians and you know it was completely different viewpoints. there were some younger reporters who said, yeah, we're online, you know, we're still part of the conversation. there was an older reporter who'd been around for a very long, a journalist who said and i remember this so well, he

said, you have to smell a smell of the bodies and so it's a debate now, three years later, you know, there's certain echoes of that question. so i'd be very interested in your your viewpoint on whether if you are physically removed from russia, whether you are in the depths that is needed, whether you can actually, number one, explain it. and number two, depart of that society to, explain it back to people who didn't. i guess that's the best way i can put it. thank you. hi. and thank you for having us here today. one question that i had is, i see on twitter mostly, which may or may not reflect real life at times that, there is sometimes

friction in discourse between what can be called the people are in the coalition for ukraine in the broadest meaning, which includes a lot. if not most, of russian independent journalists. but i see a lot of that kind of pushback against independent russian journalists reporting on ukraine, for example, there was a recent controversy online over like a campaign that meduza put out about, you know, reporting in ukraine on the front lines and all these things. and a lot of took twitter talking heads being like, you know, this is very bad malpractice. like what is what have guys found if you do reporting on ukraine that is the most difficult part about trying to report on this stuff being russian. thank you. yeah. so this one the works now. you want to start. i believe that the second

question definitely is not for me because i'm not reporting, but i, i would love that. but i can't and this is much i believe this is more about you, but you don't as a russian depend journalists. that's the crucial point and about the ability to feel actually what's going on your country. you know again i found my way. to avoid this horrible question because i am working with the archive and due to my. due to my agreement with the tv rain right now i'm i'm producing and well historical tv show it's about it was about so it was about the work with the archive and about what was going on for

the past five years. and so i'm not actually in the in this process of here and now journalism but i don't know honestly, i think that my colleagues are doing incredible job and they are that to these examples that masha mentioned and i mentioned how how they get in touch with military people and make them confess, do we have this historical record really important at the same time, i know that we constantly are in conversation about. do we feel anything? do we understand what is going do we feel the air? because it's it's it's crucial for the journalist to feel the air. i honestly i don't know, because i have a i there are very small connections left in russia just i don't have any relatives just

the couple of friends and i the the window closing because there were we are using zoom and they are saying to me we are praying for what's up and youtube. we are praying for because this window might be closing and that then we it's our window to the world. we are praying, but at the same time, the youtube is also being well demolished. but shut down somehow. and i think that and i, i can't imagine how you can for instance my colleagues and right they are preparing a big story about the it's an a year ago there was a horrible terror attack in crocus city hall and now they are prepare doing something and i honestly don't know how they figure it out. i know that they are doing they can and i know that in terms of

being in touch with their audience and letting their our audience know that are not alone, they are doing an incredible job, is job absolutely irrelevant due to high journalistic standards? i don't know. but maybe this time it's not that the the main point. i know that they are doing what they can in others situation. of course, they they do this work much better. if they had access. but in this circumstances they're doing what they can and the i think the, importance of their work lies in some other areas right now. yeah. so so i think i agree with honor there's no substitute for being there. there's there's we can

compensate for not being able to be there, but we can substitute for it. and obviously what journalists can do in 2025 is much better than what they could do in. 1975 because of technology. but it's hugely imperfect. and the longer we're isolated from russia, the less accurately we can report on it. as real question about russians reporting on ukraine, i think there are actually two separate topics. i think that what russian independent journalists in exile are doing that no one else can do is report on that were for russians right. the majority of the audience of independent russian media is still in russia. it's a little difficult to tell exactly where people are because most people have to use vpn in order to be able to get.

but but you can tell that 60%. yes for some public outlets, i think up to 70%. for some it's like 60%. but it's a majority of this audience is in russia. no one else is going to do it. no one else. no one else can do it. and so to say that they're not, they're somehow have no business reporting on the war in ukraine is just, i think, shortsighted. and i never hear that inside that we only hear that in exile, where people are fighting over small spaces. so in that sense, i'm actually in a less defensible position. the new york times doesn't need me to be in ukraine. other people can report ukraine for the new york times, but again, i haven't really had a problem inside ukraine and but i think you i have to as as a russian national, even though i

live in exile and even though the russian state sentenced me to eight years in prison in absentia, i have to know my place and i have to i was just in odessa last week and i like i was i tackled subject that i know i wouldn't have dared to tackle a couple of years ago which is the of russian language and imperial you naming in odessa and and i basically was very explicit with the people i interviewed saying i am not going to i don't feel like i have a right to say anything about this. but will you talk to me and that hopes like to have a russian who acknowledges that they have no right to speak on a topic really helps, and to have a russian who is actually very explicit about the fact that if russia if russian speakers in odessa want

to preserve a russian language heritage, that doesn't mean that any russian under the sun has common cause with them. it's a separate story. right. and having that acknowledged actually goes a long way. thank you. yeah. i just wanted add a little bit to your question. and so i have a different perspective. i'm a historian by training and for me being just the task of understand something without being physically there, like the natural task of a historian and so i believe that we can just used this type of understanding to the mission of the media because obviously so we can say that one of the telescopes, the media used to report buzz in as a task of the media is to make sense of the world. and as soon and just as long as

was a community of people who's united by the independent media and has trust in this people because like just we can say that the independent media is somehow all of a silver service. i mean, there are people who use this media to understand the reality. and the thing is that they know as much as know about like the war going on because they as well living in russia, have no other public information about that and as soon as we have this possibility to serve in this role as just the people who make sense of of the world, that will, i believe have some impact and, it will have some meaning for us. and in certain sense, maybe we have just less ability to report. maybe it will give us much space to make sense of what's happening because maybe, i mean, that is only part of the task. but it is still something that

we to do. so we don't know whether we'll be successful in that. but still somebody needs to do that. trying to understand what happened, how it happened, trying to understand the language, because like we have a lot of things that are much more detached from something is happening right here, right now, like language, like practices, like people's biographies, or they can be changed this quickly and we can like work with that just even if we do not have this just immediate access to what's happening like in kremlin, we don't it, but we can understand the language, we can understand the culture, we can understand the politics as practices practices. thank you so so pick another set of questions. i thank you so much for this wonderful discussion and thank you to the panelists.

i guess my question to ana and it about the depth of the archive now there is there is often the claim that russian people, you know, have this natural inclination to the war. they rally around the flag and so on and so on. an alternative claim is that in the nineties, the first chechen war caused yeltsin in his presidency more or less. so my question is whether you see a pivotal moment sometime in the late nineties, early 2000, when the story of the authoritarianism and, it's putin's modification and the question to is that the perception of the second chechen war was absolutely different from the perception of the first

war. and one of the institutional means to ensure there is a different perception was an involvement of mikhail lesson into. the works of the ministry of of the press. and when they started to regulate the coverage and when the media most was transferred around from its original owner to to gazprom and so and so on. so in other words, authoritarianism comes with an institutional package design to to impact people's perceptions. and i remember you mentioned the thousands for a think as one of the moments. so the question is whether it's 2004 or should we look back into the history at the early origins of putin's authoritarianism or we should just look at at the current times.

hi. thank you, everybody. in looking at the goals for the media archive going forward, among those is archiving social media posts from journalists, i was curious whether there's any idea yet what going to determine what type of social media post gets archived because of course some independent media are very so if you guys have any ideas already about that. and i hello, thank you very much. just quick question. do you have like use that you can describe for which you use archive to provide new knowledge or new understanding on what's happening? thank you.

thank you so much to everyone that ends up here speaking. i found very much inspired by a lot of you guys have to say, and i want to thank you for all the great work that you do trying to, you know, keep independent journalism in russia life. i know it's not easy, but you guys do an incredible job of, um, i wanted to just talk about what i'm guessing you mentioned right at the end, um, in talking about, you know, americans kind of reflecting this. and one of the things i've been really grappling with lately is at the very core and trend and thread i'm seeing of a why mass

censorship that is being, you know, done uh, under the justification of scapegoating the lgbtq community. and you know, it's something that you've seen in russia in the censorship of, you know, queer identities in public and in media and in representation. and i just wanted to ask with again, everything that has been lately here, what do you think americans can learn from the russian experience this think thank you so much for the questions. who would want to start. well, so the first question was about, uh, it's actually interesting. uh, what was it about? because if it's about my ideas

about, the turning point, when it's all, all of a sudden turned and went, hell, i believe will spend a lot of time and i won't give you one answer. actually, i don't think there was 1.1 moment. i don't believe in it. um, i believe in institute inertia of kgb school and so on. but in terms of the archive we have now, we have this, um, limitation. we say that we start with year 12 and with putin coming to power. but honestly and i'm a little bit shy to, to say because here it's, here's jonathan baker to whom we were actually presenting the whole idea of the archive and we were thinking, well, we can't come to the people and say we want to archive everything, have too well, okay, let's let's

start with putin. but of course we are already violating this limitation and the etiology magazine, which was, um, added to our collection, of course it is, uh, it is a, it's in a media which was operating in late nineties and it, it was actually with the the media of media mass holding. in 2001. so we are already violating it and. i'm sure that we, i'm sorry, but we will be violating it further because it's too much interesting. there is much interesting in in the nineties so yeah let me say a few words about the telegram and about the cases. so it was telegram i would say that. so we were lucky because so we can transform that a technical

desk so we can try to preserve all the telegram channels that are cited by the russian independent so we can see the links. so i mean, as soon as like russian independent media mentioned them as a valuable source of information. so can give us the least that we start working with trying to see. so what just what a qualified as they are as independent as like independent media or telegram channels because yes we understand that like the like the community journalists understand the value of independent deliverables better than we cam. and so in this case, we can trust the community. and that's the thing we try to do because we do not want to come. what was then like some objective measure of value of independence, but can trust the communities as working with that. and regarding the cases so the the just the examples that come

to my mind, it is like we different ways of linguistic analysis trying to see the how the just the meaning of the words or, the description of the events change throughout the time. and so we have like scholars coming to saying that could you please provide with a dataset, for example, of old use regarding the chechen war? and we try to understand how that sentiment expressed in this article changed how the words used to describe the terrorist, the separatist, the chechen warriors changed. and so how the meaning of the of this article and we can do that was different. it was different subjects. we can talk about the illegal migration, trying to understand how just the years, the coverage of this topic by independent media or we can just with the mentioning of alexey navalny and just to see how he was part of

the bigger news agenda and how it changed from different media. so just everything that you can just get all the new information that you can get from just analyzing the big datasets of words just you can use, and that's up to you the creativity of the researchers to use the data so that we can provide provide. can. i'll try to answer last question, which so you, you talked about censorship of lgbt. q related content and. i think this is where i mean, we've learned obviously we've over the years that there are many different kinds of censorship, but it is to use the word censorship, sort of pedantic, early and say that censorship is what the state does and we are seeing that we're that so like the cdc retractions are really good

example of that with a number of words that articles being retracted that contained any one of a number of words that this administration has actually declared to be no longer allowed read. but there are also so there's also the more sort of the vaguer category that we often refer to as self-censorship. and i think is very useful to think of it in the terms that timothy snyder, which is the terms of anticipatory obedience, and we're seeing a lot of that. and i think where where snyder's analysis doesn't go far enough is an exploring all the very, very good reasons to in advance. and i've sort been mentally

creating a taxonomy of all the reasons that i have heard that. i heard over the years working in russia for being an advance. so there is the the so the responsibility to others reason because if you don't if, you don't obey in advance, then you're putting other people risk other employees at your magazine and other employees at your publishing house. and i have very specific memories of when i was an editor, when the publisher would come to me and say, you know, do you want to get 325 people fired? you want to leave their families without livelihoods? there's the higher purpose argument where you which is transactional rate get you help the children with cancer in exchange for for supporting putin real life example there's the sort of the the the rational profit argument which also

doubles as the responsibility two others argument and a person's other businesses may be affected if they don't censor. we've seen that already in this, right. we we saw the publisher of the washington post and the publisher of the los angeles times pull endorsements in those papers. from what we can surmise, we know this for a fact, but it's but from what we can surmise, probably because of potential threats to to their other businesses, and then there's sort of the zeitgeist argument, which actually is one of the most powerful arguments. well, this is where the culture is going. this is how this is what most people think this is no longer relevant. this is the language we now use probably best example, again, in this country, most is mark zuckerberg talking about the cultural turning point that the election was and how for those

for that reason, his ending the fact checking program moving part part of metadata to texas and as he later said in joe rogan's podcast, creating a more masculine culture and those are all really good. they're not stupid, they're not they're not arguments being sold of fear. they're actually rational. and sometimes even more problematically, they're values based, right? it was like a responsive ability to other people. the only thing we can propose as a counter argument is they don't really help like, first of all, if you're not willing to sacrifice your principles and your values indefinitely, eventually you're going to run afoul of the autocracy that you're helping build. you can seed one thing, you can see two things. you can you can see the the t

and the lgbt. and then you will see the lgbt lgb in the lgbt, and then you will start seeing other stuff. and then eventually, like that publisher who asked me to kill a piece because 325 people would get fired, you end up in exile anyway, and unless you really become a building block of that autocracy that and the price of it becoming a building block of the price of becoming an actual central in integrity is extremely hot. it is high personally, it is high financially. it is. it is. it is high. it is actually high price that people eventually pay in even in power just to be able to stay intact. and so these are rational tactical arguments, but they're not good long term arguments. and the counterargument is an autocracy cannot be built without anticipate or obedience. if people do not see their power, then it doesn't happen.

and that's what we have to learn to. shoot. well, we are out of time. i would to thank the panel once. please follow the website and social media of russia. independent media archive and the russia program. of course, because we're here, we'll have way events and yeah, an exciting time. well i. i hope you've heard my bitterness. thank you so much for coming. thank you. just. you know i'm not.

okay.

[cheering] >> good afternoon, everyone. and a very warm welcome to those of you here in person.