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Russian Internet Protests – These Crowd Estimates Are Propaganda
The Russian parliament is currently discussing a new law that will establish an autonomous internet in Russia. The network will no longer depend on servers and services hosted in other countries.
The U.S. dislikes that as shutting down Russia's internet by manipulating servers in the U.S. will no longer be an option. Spying on Russian internet traffic will also become more difficult.
The usual 'liberals' in Russia were told to raise some protest against the planned move. The BBC reports:
Thousands of people in Russia have protested against plans to introduce tighter restrictions on the internet.
A mass rally in Moscow and similar demonstrations in two other cities were called after parliament backed the controversial bill last month.
The government says the bill, which allows it to isolate Russia's internet service from the rest of the world, will improve cyber-security.
But campaigners say it is an attempt to increase censorship and stifle dissent.
Activists say more than 15,000 people gathered in Moscow on Sunday, which is double the estimate given by the police.
Reuters gives slightly different numbers:
The rally gathered around 15,300 people, according to White Counter, an NGO that counts participants at rallies. Moscow police put the numbers at 6,500.
Reports of crowd numbers are used for propaganda purposes and often false. On February 22 the British oligarch Richard Brenson organized a concert in Cucuta, Colombia. While "authorities" in Colombia claimed that there were "over 400,000 people in attendance", Vice News reported more than 300,000 and the Washington Post wrote that 200,000 were there. By using aerial pictures and scientific crowd density measurements we proved that less than 20,000 people attended the concert. Following that the Washington Post silently deleted its 200,000 claim.
The BBC provides two pictures with its piece.
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Note that both are relatively tight front shots of the demonstration. It is impossible to check a crowd size from frontal pictures. Professor of Crowd Science at Manchester Metropolitan University G. Keith Still notes about density estimates that:
Density can appear higher with lower CCTV angles
That such frontal pictures are very misleading was demonstrated in 2015 when photos revealed how a small number of hypocrites abused a large memorial march they did not take part in for a photo-op.
Here now is an aerial picture of the "mass rally" in Moscow.
via Russian Perspective – bigger
That picture allows for a quite accurate crowd estimate. The width of an arterial road lane is 3.3 to 3.6 meters (11-12 feet). The street in the picture has ten lanes plus a medial strip of 1 meter. The total front of the demonstration is thus 37 meters. One can use the comparison to the lane width to measure the depth of the crowd. Detail picture analysis shows a medium dense crowd in the first 7 meters from the front with about 2.5 people per square meter and a light to medium density of 1.5 people per square meter for the next seven meter. The number of people beyond that are probably some 300 in total.
We can thus calculate:
37m * 7m * 2.5 ppl/m2 + 37m * 7m * 1.5 ppl/m2 + 300 ppl = 1.336 people
Even if we assume a high density of 3.5 ppl/m2 in the front zone, 2.5 ppl/m2 in the zone behind them, and 500 people mingling in the rear area the total is only 2,054 people. The city of Moscow has a population of 17 million with another three million in the suburbs around it. 2,000 protesters are 0.01% of its population. One would have to triple the density to even reach the police estimate of 6.500 participants or 0.0325% of the people living in Moscow.
Neither the police estimate nor the much higher estimate of the White Counter 'NGO' that Reuters quotes are consistent with the picture. According to a 2014 blog post at irevolutions.org "White Counter" was created in Russia:
in order to counter government figures on the number of protestors who join demonstrations. As is typical, the Kremlin will always downplay the numbers.
In this case the Kremlin seems to have tripled the attendance number. Is Putin somehow against the new law?
I actually used to know the people from White Counter. Not only that, but I have personally participated in some of the countings in 2013–2015, so you can probably call me “a former member of White Counter”. Although there was no actual membership, and it was not really an NGO — just a bunch of activists and volunteers.
I can personally vouch for the accuracy of those countings I have participated in. The way rallies work in Russia, the police sets up a row of booths where they check the participants for explosives and weapons before they let them in. Each White Counter volunteer would be given a counter — a small mechanical gadget with a button — and assigned a booth (sometimes two) to watch. Before a planned opposition rally, an organizer would call me and ask if I wanted to participate. Sometimes I said yes, sometimes I said no. It was a purely voluntary thing, absolutely no money involved whatsoever. No food or any other types of perks for the volunteers either. After the counting, we exchanged our figures and tallied them up. The only reward for participating in a counting would be knowing the total figure earlier than anybody else. I knew the countings were correct because I saw the other volunteers’ figures when we compared our results and they matched mine (after correction for the fact that the booths in the center had more people coming through than the booths on the sides). The next day, the organizer of White Counter would publish the figures in his Facebook account. If I remember correctly, he was a math teacher in a specialized math school, or, perhaps, a teaching assistant at a math faculty.
Now, the interesting thing is that the Moscow police would also publish a figure after each rally, and it was always two times smaller. Almost exactly two times smaller, which is why we joked among ourselves that the government considered the opposition people “half-people”. It also seemed like some sort of an indirect admission from the police that they knew the real figure, but were given orders to lie. In fact, during one of the countings, a senior police officer approached me and asked how many people I’ve counted so far. I gave him the figure for my booth, and later came up to him and informed him of the final figure for all booths. Lo and behold, the next day the police has published a figure that was twice as small. I think it was something like 48,000 for that particular rally, while the police published something like 25,000. So, again, I can personally vouch for the fact that in 2013–2015 the Moscow police has — on multiple occasions — deflated the number of participants by a factor of two.
The Russian opposition is not like the Venezuelan opposition. It’s not as much about class. There are rich people and poor people, math professors and warehouse workers (to give just two examples of people I’ve personally met). Of course, people tend to get worse as you move closer to opposition leadership. Some of them hate the existing socio-politico-economical system so much, that they lose all sense of proportion and become insane neocon-ish Russophobes, like Kasparov. Some of them are former high-ranking bureaucrats who’ve fallen out of favor and hope to ride the wave of unrest to return to the cabinets of power, like Kasyanov and Ryzhkov. Some of them are narcissistic poseurs, like Yashin. Some of them are Russian Guaidós-in-waiting, like Navalny. But among the rank-and-file opposition activists, there are also many genuine, honest, decent people who, for some reason, have come to dislike or distrust the Russian government and then fallen into a trap of thinking that foreign governments must be better. I can’t speak of the current state of the Russian opposition movement, as I have left it in 2015, but I hope you get my point: there are, or at least there used to be in 2011–2015, many decent people in that movement who are/were genuinely misled about many things, or simply deeply unhappy about Russia’s problems (of which there are many). Not all these people are/were shills/sell-outs/traitors to their country.
Having said all that, I agree with b’s crowd estimate for the presented photo. Thus, one of the following two statements must be true:
1) at some point after 2015, White Counter activists got corrupted and started publishing fake numbers;
2) the photo was taken before the crowd has fully assembled (kinda like the MSM news channels showed videos of crowds at Bernie’s rallies hours before they actually started).
Regarding the law in question, I fully support it. As I’ve learned over the years, Putin doesn’t do things because he has nothing better to do. If he’s doing something, there must be a really good reason. It is likely that the U.S. has threatened to disconnect Russia from the financial payments systems and even from the internet (perhaps, during the notorious Kerry’s visit to Moscow, when he was seen wielding a mysterious red suitcase). Which is why Russia’s Central Bank has introduced its own interbank payment system, as well as Russia’s own debit/credit card system called “Mir”, and why the Russian government is now making sure that the Russian segment of the internet is capable of autonomous operation. It’s really a set of technical measures, like ensuring there are reserve root DNS servers, ensuring Russian citizens’ private data is stored in Russian data centers, ensuring the Russian government does not have critical dependencies on foreign web services/web apps, and so on. There’s nothing “repressive” in these laws, really. The only well-known internet company that’s currently blocked in Russia is LinkedIn, and that’s because they have refused to store Russian citizens’ data in Russia. There’s no “Great Firewall of Russia” or anything like that. So it’s not about the Russian government trying to isolate Russian internet, but rather about the U.S. threatening to isolate Russian internet and the Russian government acting prudently and preparing the country to withstand such an event.
Posted by: S | Mar 12 2019 0:06 utc | 21
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