Part of the reason for the growth of internet users in
Russia is that the internet is the one form of mass media not under tight de
facto control by the state. That's
also the reason why the internet has played a large role in organizing the
political opposition to Vladimir Putin during the past year; Alexei Navalny
for one has risen to national stature based on his blog, which freely
criticizes the Putin administration.
Seeing that they missed the boat on setting up a
web-filtering system like China's Great Firewall, the Kremlin is taking a new
tack: they'll try to beat the opposition at their own social media game. Last week, Kremlin officials announced that
they would be launching their own, as yet unnamed, government-run social networking site for Russia, set up along the lines of Facebook. Officials have
high hopes for the new networking site and say that private capital will be
used to develop the web project.
But Russia already has its own privately-run Facebook
clones: Vkontakte (“In Contact”) and Odnoklassniki (“Our Class”), the
former of which bears an amazing resemblance to Facebook. Since these social networks already exist,
along with an official Russian-language option for Facebook as well, critics
wonder why anyone would join a government-run social networking site,
especially since it is reasonable to assume that the government would be
monitoring content on the site and would likely take a dim view of any critique
of the government.
“If the government creates some
form of social network, then people will not join it,” said Andrei Soldatov, an
expert on Russia's security services and the internet in an article in The
Guardian. “It is not realistic.”
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