Russia: A tearful farewell to Instagram – it should have consequences

Arrived in reality
Russia: A tearful farewell to Instagram – it should have consequences

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Instagram has been banned in Russia since Sunday night. What seems like a supposedly insignificant reaction to Western sanctions has a profound impact on the everyday lives of young Russians.

It happened. Around midnight on Sunday, Instagram in Russia could no longer be updated. After Facebook and Twitter, this is the third online network that is no longer accessible to users in Russia. Against the backdrop of humanitarian emergencies, war crimes, and economic sanctions, however, the news of the end of Russia’s Instagram seems like an unimportant banality during this time – it is not.

Instagram: Hardly anything is more popular in Russia

The end of Instagram in Russia cannot be compared to that of Facebook and Twitter. The user numbers alone show that. According to the specialist portal “eMarketer”, only around 7.5 million Russians used Facebook in 2021, which is also due to the fact that there is a Russian equivalent on the market with V-Kontakt. Instagram has 51 million users in Russia, many of whom belong to the country’s young and urban elite.

A look at the British “Daily Mail” shows just how cliché-obsessed the reporting on the Russian Instagram ban is. This is about an influencer who says goodbye to the platform in a tearful video: “For me, Instagram is everything, it’s my soul. It’s what I wake up with, fall asleep with and spent five damn years of my life have.” What many consider a funny exaggeration, of course, isn’t.

For example, “T-Online” comments on the influencer’s tears with the words that she is crying for her “perfect Insta world” and describes the farewell to Russian influencers as a “brief moment of truthfulness in the so blurred Instagram reality”. It’s easy to poke fun at this point. In the end, however, such ironic reporting from above misjudges the reality – the ban on Instagram brings a lot of political explosiveness from a social point of view.

No parallel world, but everyday life

Instagram has long since ceased to be a softly drawn, ideal parallel world to which insecure teenagers retreat when they are alone in their room. Anyone who writes something like this has missed a few years of digital development. Instagram has long been an integral part of everyday life for many people around the world (and especially in Russia). The social network has long since ceased to be a place of pure self-presentation, but has evolved over the past few years compared to Facebook. For many young users, it is a friendship network, job exchange, source of income, diary, chat forum, shop or news portal all at the same time.

One reason for the ban on the network may have been the news from parent company Meta last week that Instagram and Facebook are no longer automatically deleting posts about the Russian military or Russian politicians because of Putin’s war in Ukraine. The Russian public prosecutor’s office is therefore already investigating completely ironically because of “incitement to murder”.

Is banning Instagram an own goal for Putin?

However, the supposedly logical step in the Russian sanctions policy could in the long term cause more damage in its own country than in the American parent company. Because the Instagram ban not only affects the future of the country with the young urban elite, but also thousands of influential companies, start-ups, influencers and stars. For all of them, Instagram has been the biggest source of income and promotion machine for years. Building comparable reach on a new Russian-only network may take years for many influential people in Russia.

The Russian media regulator Roskomnadzor has banned the platform. She wants to suppress information from the West and accepts the consequences. The authority should have expected the panic that broke out in the Russian part of the global network shortly after the ban was announced. Fashion blogger Karina Nigai, who is followed by almost three million people on Instagram, posted a picture and wrote under it: “I’m still in the anger stage and the acceptance stage is still far away”.

Musician Anna Ivanova, who is followed by 4.4 million people, said an emotional goodbye: “Millions of stories, thousands of posts, thousands of happy moments we shared – all these things have made us one big Insta family. I’m sure that everything will get better and we will get even more, but for now I wish all of us only peace and strength to get through all the difficulties”.

The supposedly expected Russian Instagram ban should feel like a major turning point for many young Russians. Because what it means not to be on Instagram for a day only knows who is one of the millions of dependent users of this network. By banning Instagram, Putin may have ended up hitting those at the core of their everyday lives who would never have rebelled against him. According to media reports, it has been apparent since the beginning of the war that it is above all the young elite from the Russian cities who are currently leaving Russia for the West. With the tearful ban on Instagram, Putin has once again curtailed this layer so fundamentally in their everyday life that the number of refugees among them is likely to continue to rise. In the end, Russia’s future could drift in a direction where she can update her Insta feed again.

Swell: “Daily Mail”, “AFP”, “T-Online”

This article originally appeared on Stern.de

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