Instagram is now completely forbidden in Russia. The country’s media regulator, Roskomnadzor, issued an official ban on the app on Friday, but granted Russians a 48-hour grace period before it was implemented.
GlobalCheck (via Bloomberg), a program that investigates internet restrictions in Russia, confirmed the block, which went into effect at midnight on Monday.
After a temporary adjustment to its hate speech policy that allowed users to express calls for violence against the Russian troops entering Ukraine, Russian authorities asked a court to name Meta, Instagram’s parent company, a “extremist organization.” According to Roskomnadzor, Instagram was banned in Russia because the “social network [distributed] informational materials containing invitations to conduct violent crimes against Russian Federation residents, including military personnel.”
On Friday, Meta’s president of worldwide affairs, Nick Clegg, sent out a message on Twitter. “To be clear, this strategy will only be implemented in Ukraine,” he added. “We don’t have a beef with the Russians. As far as the Russian people are concerned, our policies against hate speech have not changed.”
https://twitter.com/nickclegg/status/1502349805221126144
Clegg stated that it would be incorrect to prevent Ukrainians from “expressing their resistance and fury at the invading military forces,” and that Meta’s policies were “focused on protecting people’s rights to speech as an expression of self-defense in response to a military invasion of their country.”
He also stated that the policy shift was “temporary,” and that it was made in “exceptional and unusual circumstances.”
On Friday, Instagram’s CEO, Adam Mosseri, took to Twitter to express his displeasure with the restriction, writing, “Because 80% of Russians follow an Instagram account outside their country, this move will isolate 80 million individuals in Russia from one another and the rest of the world. This is incorrect.”
Instagram has now joined Meta’s Facebook in being blocked in Russia. It’s unknown what will happen to the company’s other subsidiary, Whatsapp. In addition, Twitter has been blocked in the country. In Russia, TikTok is still available, but Russians are unable to publish videos.
According to the Washington Post, Russian Instagram influencers and producers were outraged by the announcement, with many claiming that they would lose their principal source of cash and method of communication with their followers. Many people have asked their followers to switch to Telegram or other similar applications.