createPoliticsResponse: the political computation of state borders in Yandex maps

Abstract This article exposes how a large-scale tech platform, Yandex, addresses geopolitical conflicts through its digital cartography service, Yandex Maps. When delivering its services to users across different nation-states, Yandex Maps computes the display national borders in order to match oboth the expectation of the user requesting a map and a given geopolitical order to which the company adheres, and which it reifies. In order to uncover these algorithmic processes, we first propose a methodology based on a spatial understanding of source code, which we then apply in two parts. Then, we show how the regions and borders of the world are conceptualized and assembled by Yandex Maps backend processes, before tracing how the client/server web architecture enables the individualized delivery of borders to be displayed to individualized users.