Russia’s federal communications monitoring and censorship agency Roskomnadzor plans to use artificial intelligence to try to track online posts, comments and jokes (memes) critical of Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to a report by Russian investigative publication iStories.

The leak of more than 2 million documents from Roskomnadzor, which was reported by iStories, the German newspaper Suddeutche Zeitung and other partners, showed that the agency was tasked with being Putin’s personal watchdog, tracking anyone who criticizes the president, the Kyiv Independent cites.

The agency’s information will be passed on to the Putin administration and Russian law enforcement agencies.

The report says that a unit of more than 1,000 employees at Roskomnadzor specializes in tracking content ranging from speculation about Putin’s health to memes mocking the Russian leader.

According to the report, developers have begun training neural networks to recognize such content in order to improve the effectiveness of its tracking.

According to the report, since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, Roskomnadzor has blocked 125,000 pages of content about Russia’s war in Ukraine and related topics.

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