According to internet monitoring agency GlobalCheck, Russia’s anticipated Instagram ban took effect today, rendering the social media network inaccessible to the great majority of the country’s population.
The country announced measures to ban Instagram last week in response to parent company Meta’s decision to allow users in certain countries to call for violence against Russian soldiers in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Russia has been gradually restricting access to online platforms in order to maintain control over the flow of information about the war and has already banned Facebook and Twitter.
Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri stated in a tweet last Friday that “this decision will isolate 80 million people in Russia from one another and from the rest of the world, as 80% of Russians follow an Instagram account outside the country. This is incorrect.”
Russian influencers on Instagram tweeted farewell messages to their fans over the weekend, advising them to follow them on other platforms or use VPN software to circumvent the state’s ban.
Instagram has also provided a venue for Russians, particularly affluent billionaires and their families, to express their opposition to the war. Sofia Abramovich, the daughter of billionaire Roman Abramovich, made an anti-Putin Instagram post before deleting it, while wealthy Russian banker Oleg Tinkov declared the conflict “unthinkable and intolerable.”
