It became easier to be labeled an extremist in Russia. On Monday, the label – once reserved for the Taliban and the Islamic State, among others – was given to Facebook’s parent company, Meta.
A Moscow court ruled that Meta was an extremist organization in a decision that effectively banned social media platforms Facebook and Instagram from operating in Russia. But the court’s ruling included an interesting carve-out: WhatsApp. Both other platforms had been blocked earlier in March after clashes with the Kremlin over content referencing the war in Ukraine. But the ruling allowed WhatsApp, the company’s messenger platform, to continue to operate in the country on purpose. “The decision does not apply to the activities of Meta’s messenger WhatsApp, due to the lack of functionality for the public dissemination of information,” the court said, according to Reuters.
For some, WhatsApp savings is a sign of increasingly erratic policy making by Moscow. “I don’t understand how they can do that,” said Kevin Rothrock, editor-in-chief of the English-language edition of the Russian news channel meduza† “Why only some of Meta’s products are extremist is not entirely rational to me.”
But for others, it’s a sign that the Kremlin fears that ordinary Russians, already struggling with sanctions and shortages, will tolerate only so much disruption to their daily lives. WhatsApp is one of the few remaining western services in Russia. While the app isn’t used to spread news in the same way that Facebook or Instagram are, experts and people in Russia alike suspect the Kremlin is hesitant to block the country’s most-used platforms. WhatsApp is extremely popular in Russia, with 84 million monthly users as of January 2022, according to Statista.
That popularity means officials would risk political reaction if it were blocked, said Alena Epifanova, a research associate at the German Council for Foreign Relations. “The state is trying to calculate collateral damage,” she says, adding that WhatsApp in Russia is mostly politically neutral and is used by people to chat with classmates or their families. “For example, you can’t compare WhatsApp in Russia with WhatsApp in Brazil.” The state does not want to risk “getting an outcry from people who are not really politicized, but use WhatsApp for privacy,” she adds.
Alena Georgobiani, a communications expert based in Moscow, also believes that WhatsApp is protected by the number of people using the app, because an attempt to block the service would disturb many Russians. “Everyone uses it. I don’t have many people in my contact list who don’t have WhatsApp,” she says.
Popularity as a protection mechanism does not only apply to WhatsApp. A look at Statista’s 2020 list of Russia’s most popular platforms shows that the country’s authorities have been blocking from below. Twitter, the 11th most popular app in the country, was blocked on March 4. TikTok, the eighth most popular app, suspended its services on March 6. Now Facebook and Instagram, the seventh and fourth most popular respectively, are also gone. † Even so, the two most popular US platforms in the country, YouTube and WhatsApp, are still active.
