As the conflicts between Ukraine and Russia continue, actions are announced to try to moderate the content avoiding and hoaxes. In this context, Russia has now left all users in the country without access to Instagram.
Russia announced its plans to ban access to Instagram last week, claiming that this is a response to Meta’s decision to allow Facebook and Instagram users in some countries to take a stand against Russian soldiers, after the invasion of Ukraine.
The origin of the veto on access to Instagram in Russia
The conflict between Russia and Meta began a few days ago, when the country’s government criminalized the deliberate dissemination of what Moscow considers to be false reports.
While this was happening, Facebook and Instagram both in the European Union and in , which together prompted an immediate response from the Russian communications regulator that completely blocked access to Facebook from this country.
Roskomnadzor, the Russian watchdog, said that there had been at least 26 cases of discrimination against Russian media by Facebook since October 2020, while Nick Clegg, president of global affairs for Meta, said that blocking the platform would deprive “millions of Russians from getting reliable information, from communicating with friends and family and it would mean they would be silenced.” Atime Russia adds to the veto to Instagram.
Faced with this action by the Russian government, Adam Mosseri, director of Instagram, assured in a tweet that this decision «will separate 80 million users in Russia from each other and from the rest of the world, since ~80% of people in Russia follow an Instagram account outside of their country. This is bad”
On Monday, Instagram will be blocked in Russia. This decision will cut 80 million in Russia off from one another, and from the rest of the world as ~80% of people in Russia follow an Instagram account outside their country. This is wrong.
— Adam Mosseri (@mosseri)
VKontakte, Telegram and Odnoklassniki: the Russian social networks that could host influencers
While this was happening, the weekend and Russian personalities posted farewell messages to their followers on Instagram, encouraging them to follow them on other platforms or to use a VPN in order to avoid the ban.
In any case, although according to the , 37% of Russians use Facebook, while 35% said they are a TiktTok user and 14% go to Twitter regularly, it is the most popular social network in the country, with 73% of those surveyed as users.
It is true that YouTube and Instagram are currently quite popular among Russian users, with 68% and 59% adoption respectively. VKontakte has more than 650 million registered users and an estimated 97 million active users per monthwhile its interface is suitable in 85 different languages.
Other of the most popular in Russia are which in 2021 ranked fourth among social networks and with 42% preference of Russian users, with Moy Mir in third place among the most important Russian social networks, all belonging to the Mail.ru parent company.
Secondly, Rutube, owned by Gazprom Media, is considered as YouTube’s competition in Russiaand will probably have a rebound in user consumption within its territory, if the levels of censorship do not drive content creators away from this platform.
And entering instant messengers, very similar in operation to WhatsApp, is positioned among the favorites, despite the fact that in 2018 the Russian government prohibited it, since in 2020 the sanction was lifted, and although WhatsApp with 77 million users is still the preferred messaging app for Russian users, Telegram currently has 38 million users .
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