The December 4, 2011, Russian Duma elections demonstrated that the Internet is playing an increasingly important role in Russia. According to media reports, protests that spread after the elections were led by Russia’s youth, who had organized themselves on the Internet. The protesters had spread their messages through video-sharing and microblogging sites such as YouTube and Twitter and social media networks like Facebook. The Internet during the past several months has also shown its potential to propel previously little-known individuals into positions of prominence; there was a sudden leap in the number of mentions of prominent anti-corruption blogger Aleksey Navalny in the Russian news media as his online movement spilled out onto Russia’s streets.
While events such as Moldova’s Twitter “revolution” and the Arab Spring have led pundits to ask if the Internet in many developing nations is truly free or only nominally so, key members of Russia’s government have maintained for over a decade that the Russian Internet is indeed free. According to CNN, in 1999, four days before becoming president, then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin held a conference with Russia’s leading Internet entrepreneurs and promised to allow Internet freedom and to not resort to “Chinese or Vietnamese models” of censorship. Putin has largely stuck to this belief, and in his annual televised call-in show on December 16, 2011 he reiterated that “restriction of online freedoms is technologically complicated, politically wrong, and is not needed in Russia.” Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev, who headed the Federal Security Service (FSB) during Putin’s first two presidential terms, seconded this sentiment in a recent interview, noting that, “attempts to stop people from communicating are in principle counterproductive and even amoral.”
Left to be relatively free and expand on its own, the Internet in Russia is now increasing in penetration more quickly in Russia than in any country in Europe, and social media usage is growing faster in Russia than in any other country in the world. Internet penetration is currently around 42 percent (59.7 million users), and while this may not seem like much now, it marks a sixfold increase over 2002, and the number is expected to double in the next few years. On top of that, the whole of the Russian Internet (RuNET) itself is expanding, having added over 84,000 domain names in the last month alone and currently totaling approximately 4.5 million across the .ru and .рф domains.
Confidence in the Internet is increasing as well. According to a 2011 nationwide poll conducted by the Russian Public Opinion Foundation (Fond Obshchestvennykh Mnenii – FOM), the Internet is increasingly becoming a trusted source of information. This is important in a nation where television has historically been by far the most ubiquitous and most trusted medium for information dissemination. According to RIA Novosti, this attitude is change, and Russians are beginning to put less stock in television and more in online media for gathering reliable and speedy information. The state news agency points to the events of the January 24 Domodedevo airport bombing as impetus for such a change, noting that news of the story broke on Twitter a full hour before national media outlets began to cover it, providing information-consumers a glimpse into the shortcomings of traditional media sources.
The percentage of active Internet users (in Russia mostly 18-24 year olds) that use blogs and/or social networking sites is higher than in the U.S., and Russians spend the most time per user on social media sites than any other country in the world. In addition, according to Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, those who do use social networking sites are interacting more with their online peers than do their counterparts in other countries, meaning that messages can travel faster and have more impact than we may see in other countries.
Thus, recent events demonstrate, and statistics corroborate, that the Internet is taking on a more important role in Russia, from the increase in general penetration to the dedication of Russia’s netizens to engaging with the medium. While the government’s stated position on Internet freedom may seem paradoxical given recent shutdowns of political websites, the general increase in numbers of users on the medium demonstrates that the Internet in Russia will play an increasingly important role in the country’s future.
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