Due to the blocking of Facebook in Russia, the majority of domestic users of social networks will not suffer, experts say. The popularity of the American Meta Platforms service in the Russian Federation began to fall earlier, young people leave the site, they pointed out. According to experts, Facebook has long turned from a means of communication and exchange of opinions into a propaganda mouthpiece of the United States and a conductor of advertising of dubious content. The social network may lose up to 40 billion rubles of annual revenue due to blocking, the Association of Professional Users of Social Networks and Messengers did not exclude.
Facebook at the door
On March 4, Roskomnadzor began blocking access to the Facebook social network owned by the American Meta Platforms, Inc., the department said. The reason for this was the discrimination of Russian media accounts, follows from the statement. In recent days, the social network has restricted access to the accounts of Zvezda, RIA Novosti, Sputnik, Russia Today, Lenta.ru and Gazeta.ru. According to the regulator, since October 2020, there have been 26 cases of discrimination against domestic information resources by Facebook.
Such restrictions are prohibited by the federal law “On measures of influence on persons involved in violations of fundamental human rights and freedoms,” Roskomnadzor noted. The document was adopted, among other things, to prevent violations of the key principles of the free flow of information and unimpeded access of Russian users to domestic media, the department stressed.
According to HootSuit and We are Social, just under 40% of Russian users logged into Facebook in 2021. For comparison, for the domestic social network VKontakte, this figure was 78%. WhatsApp and Instagram services owned by Meta Platforms were used by 74.8% and 61.2% of Russians connected to the Internet.
On February 24, Roskomnadzor sent Meta an order to remove the restrictions imposed by the social network Facebook on Russian media and explain the reason for their introduction. However, the company did not react in any way.
Facebook is not the only media service that was restricted in Russia on March 4th. Based on the decision of the Prosecutor General, the media outlet Meduza, based in Latvia, as well as Radio Liberty (both are recognized in the Russian Federation as foreign media agents) are no longer available on the Runet.
At the same time, from March 1, the RKN resumed the slowdown of Twitter on desktop computers.
“Roskomnadzor has restored measures in the form of slowing down the speed of the Internet service on fixed-line communication devices in the territory of the Russian Federation in connection with the dissemination of unreliable socially significant information on the subject of a special military operation in Ukraine by the site,” the agency said.
The Russian audience has recently been actively leaving foreign venues. Facebook in our country is only in seventh place in terms of the number of users – 8.9 million. For comparison, VK has 72 million of them, Odnoklassniki has 46.5 million, according to Saxo Bank data. According to his estimates, Facebook in Russia is actively losing its youth audience: now only 27% of teenagers have an account on Facebook, while in 2012, 94% of representatives of this audience segment had pages on the social network.
social evolution
Facebook was attractive a few years ago, when it was considered a communication tool, not a propaganda machine used by unknown people who are not Russian citizens, said Artem Kiryanov, deputy chairman of the State Duma committee on economic policy. The social network is losing subscribers in the Russian Federation – this is due, by the way, to an increase in the activity of domestic social networks, he noted.
“In recent months and days, it has become clear that Facebook has become a mouthpiece for the United States, broadcasting one-sided biased information, propaganda, dubious and false statements about what is happening in Russia and in the world,” the deputy noted.
According to Artem Kiryanov, blocking is a necessary measure. It had to be resorted to when all the other arguments for sobering up the management of Faceebook were chosen, the parliamentarian pointed out. Now most users will move to other social networks, he believes.
Blocking Facebook is a timely measure, agrees member of the Public Chamber, director of the Safe Internet League Ekaterina Mizulina. Perhaps such a decision should have been made last summer, when the social network received second place in the anti-rating for violations of Russian digital legislation, she believes.
— Facebook has become the mouthpiece of the information war against Russia, while its biggest advertisers have become fake distributors. This distinguishes it, in particular, from Google, which has recently taken certain actions to remove inappropriate content, the expert said.
In the near future, Ekaterina Mizulina expects blocking and Instagram. Fakes also appear on WhatsApp, but not in such volumes as on Facebook, she noted.
According to the preliminary estimate of the Association of Professional Users of Social Networks and Messengers, in 2021, Russian advertisers paid Facebook about 40 billion rubles in Russia. It is possible that the social network will lose almost all of this income due to blocking, said the head of the association, Vladimir Zykov. At the same time, it is not clear how much Russian advertisers will lose on this – they place funds in Facebook accounts, and it is not clear how to withdraw them back.
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