AFP :
Allies of jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny accused Apple and Google of “censorship” on Friday after they removed opposition voting apps at the start of a three-day parliamentary election in Russia.
Polls opened across the vast country on Friday after a year that saw a crackdown on President Vladimir Putin’s opponents.
As voters began to make their way to the polls on a cold Moscow morning, the opposition said a “Smart Voting” app giving advice on how to vote had been removed from the app stores of both Apple and Google.
“They caved in to the Kremlin’s blackmail,” Leonid Volkov, an exiled aide to Navalny, said on Telegram, after Moscow accused the US tech giants of election interference and demanded they remove the app.
Navalny ally Ivan Zhdanov accused the companies of a “shameful act of political censorship”, posting a screenshot on Twitter of an email from Apple saying the app was removed because Navalny’s organisation has been declared The Kremlin welcomed the move, saying the tech giants had conformed with “the letter and spirit” of Russian law.
The app instructed Russians on how to vote strategically to try to defeat politicians from Putin’s United Russia party, after candidates critical of the Kremlin were largely barred from running in the vote.
The election for seats in the lower house State Duma, which runs until
Sunday, comes after a year that has seen Navalny jailed, many of his allies
arrested and his organisations banned.
