Last week brought the news that the Russian state was preparing for a ban on Discord, the latest move in a wider purge of Western technology firms from the region. This crusade began following the various sanctions imposed on Russia after its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, with the Putin regime seeking "digital sovereignty" through domestic tech companies that have no Western links.
Discord is based in the communist hotbed of San Francisco, California, and is estimated to have between 30-40 million users worldwide, with around 4% of the platform's traffic estimated to originate from Russia. The Russian state media regulator Roskomnadzor has been building the bureaucratic case against the platform, issuing five rulings relating to Discord since September 20, with Russian users also reporting various outages over this period.
