Russia launches AI monitoring tool Oculus to beef up its censorship machine
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The Russian censorship has just launched a new AI system to speed up the process of scouring the internet for photo and video content deemed illegal.
The automated system, known as Oculus, was introduced by the Main Radio Frequency Center, an entity overseen by the Russian federal censorship agency Roskomnadzor.
It comes as a means of coping with an “avalanche-like” growth of material that violates Russian laws. These range from LGBTQ and gambling content to mentions of the conflict in Ukraine as a war.
In 2022, more than 100,000 sources were blocked, compared to about 7,000 in the previous year.
This, in addition to Russia’s notorious internet surveillance, makes using privacy software such as VPN services even more necessary if you are soon to live or travel to Russia.
A new censor assistant
The Kremlin’s strict adherence to what citizens can see and share online is nothing new. Roskomnadzor has been populating a centralized internet blacklist since 2012 with URLs, domain names and IP addresses that are considered illegal.
However, the past year has seen a sharp increase in content that violates Russian law. This is also not surprising, since any mention of the war in Ukraine is actually prohibited by law.
“The dynamics of the detected number of violations show an avalanche-like growth of stuffing for all types of prohibited information. All this demonstrates the importance of a detailed analysis of information attacks in graphic content and the possibilities to counter them,” the Center said. , the Russian news agency Interfax reported that (opens in new tab).
As the censorship unit explained, Oculus will make this process more efficient because it can identify illegal images, symbols, scenes and even text simply by analyzing images and videos.
It “automatically detects violations such as extremism, calls for illegal gatherings, suicide, content promoting drugs, LGBT propaganda and more.”
To get a rough idea, before the system was introduced, each employee was used to reviewing more than 200 pieces of content between images and videos per day.
Oculus can instead analyze about 200,000 images, an average of three seconds per photo or video.
The Kremlin invested 57.7 million rubles (about $783,000) to develop the system, starting in September 2021. This was then first tested in December last year and now appears to be working at full capacity. However, developers will continue to improve the functionalities until 2025.
Last November, Cyberpartisans (a Belarusian hacker group) admitted a glimpse into Russian censorship tactics (opens in new tab). The group managed to hack into an internal network of the Center and download more than two terabytes of sensitive documents.
Among other revelations about how censorship works, the leak showed evidence of Russian authorities training Oculus to find unwanted images of Putin on the Internet.
