Good news: The repressive machine relaunched in Russia by President Vladimir Putin has a reverse gear. Bad news: It takes far more effort to engage it than the ones that push the machine forward.

In Russia, home of the meme-heavy propaganda and trolling operations that drew the attention of special counsel Robert Mueller, one can go to jail for reposting a meme on social networks. Last year, according to Sova, which tracks radicalism and human rights violations in Russia, 658 people were convicted for various forms of “extremist” speech and another 3,511 were fined for similar administrative violations. That’s up from 133 and 182, respectively, in 2011.

About 90 percent of the cases involve speech on the internet. An overwhelming majority of these, in turn, involve posts on social networks — or, to be precise, one social network: Vkontakte. In July, 68 percent of Russian internet users were on Vkontakte. Vkontakte, says Sova analyst Mikhail Akhmetiev, is “receptive of official requests by Russian law-enforcement agencies and hands over information to them.”

In the first half of 2018, however, the number of hate-speech cases handed to courts is down markedly, Akhmetiev says, and it’s possible the growth in convictions has stopped. That’s no accident: The brakes are being applied from on high.

Mail.ru Group, owner of Vkontakte, realized the cases were giving the network a bad name. Last month, it allowed owners to make their accounts fully private and unsearchable, a feature Facebook has long had. The Russian tech giant also petitioned the Supreme Court in Moscow to reconsider judicial practices in “extremism” cases and the parliament to grant amnesty to those convicted.

This month, the Supreme Court is expected to issue new instructions to judges in “extremism” cases, telling them a social network post isn’t in and of itself proof of intent to incite hatred, and that the size of an account’s audience should be considered. A bill decriminalizing the posts is making its way through parliament; it’s backed by the Communications Ministry, and Putin himself has ordered an analysis of the cases.

It’s easy to see why the Putin establishment is willing to take a step back from its crackdown on supposedly extremist speech. Most of the cases deal with far-right utterances and memes, often anti-Semitic or anti-immigrant ones, which would probably qualify as illegal hate speech in a number of European countries, too. But a noticeable number are so absurd they open the Kremlin to ridicule and unwelcome comparisons with the Soviet regime in its late, senile phase.

Mikhail Penkin, a left-wing activist, was jailed for four days for publishing anti-Nazi pictures that contained forbidden Nazi symbols — for example, one of a fist squeezing a swastika-carrying Nazi eagle.

In April 2018, Alexander Byvshev, a former rural schoolteacher, was banned from teaching and sentenced to 330 hours of public works for posting a poem he’d written praising Ukrainian independence and condemning Putin’s aggression.

Last month, Eduard Nikitin faced trial and forced treatment in a mental institution for posting a joke on Vkontakte. Here’s the joke:

Son to father: Daddy, do you think anything will change in our country after the election?

Father to son: I don’t think so. If you put a couple of cherries on top of a pile of (excrement), that won’t make it a cake.

This was supposedly “extremist” speech meant to incite hatred toward elected officials.

Last week, Magomed Dudov from Nalchik received a suspended sentence for publishing memes, which included a crown-wearing Putin and a picture of Stalin with the legend, “The more you kill Russians, the more they like you.”

The ridiculous convictions make Russia look like a two-bit dictatorship scared of its own shadow. That’s not the impression Putin would like to create, thus the top-level attention to Mail.ru’s attempt to shift responsibility for the hate-speech convictions away from its social network.

The softening is mostly about appearances, however. Even if “extremism” laws and current judicial practice are relaxed, the Kremlin will come up with a more finely tuned replacement. On Monday, Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, aired a proposal to set up special “digital law courts” that would consider hate-speech cases.

In other words, there’s no plan to give up the search for enemies of the state on social media.

© 2018, Bloomberg Opinion