On March 21, 2022, a Russian court ruled valued that Mark Zuckerberg’s company, Meta, had found guilty “extremist activity”. If the social networks Facebook and Instagram are already banned on Russian soil, WhatsApp can (for the moment) still continue to operate.
Meta social networks officially banned from Russia
It was in a press release that the Tverskoi District Court in Moscow announced the verdict of the trial against Meta. A trial brought by state prosecutors to assert the prohibition of the activities of the American company on Russian territory. At the end of the day on March 21, the communications regulator Roskomnadzor declared that the social networks Facebook and Instagram would be officially excluded from the list of foreign entities authorized to operate on the Internet in Russia.
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The judge’s decision also forces the media to label Meta and segrs social networks as “extremist platforms”. It is also to them prohibited from displaying their logos. In the past, Russia had already qualified other organizations “extremists”, but they were groups like the Taliban or the Islamic State. The country then extended this qualification to Jehovah’s Witnesses or to the Alexei Navalny Foundation. Today, it is an American company that is qualified as such.
80 million Russians used Instagram
Facebook ban in Russia affects 7.5 million users, while Instagram gathers more than 80 million users in Russia. With its 67 million users, WhatsApp will continue to operate for the time being on Russian territory. According to some observers, the government could put in place a strategy aimed at “not to close all services at once, but gradually, so that the Russians get used to it slowly” in order to avoid making decisions that are too unpopular. The WhatsApp app will definitely get blocked eventually.
This decision simply makes it possible to formalize the ban on Meta’s social networks because in fact they have already been banned for several weeks. An analysis of mobile Internet traffic carried out in Russia on Monday shows that Telegram, an application already popular in Russia, has overtaken WhatsApp to become the most used messaging tool. According to Pavel Chikov, a Russian human rights lawyer, rightly said on Telegram that the mere fact “To buy ads on both social networks or to acquire shares of Meta could be qualified as financing an extremist activity. It is now a criminal offence..