Outsiders soon noticed the new, closer relationship with the government. “To date, no other social network in Russia has collaborated so thoroughly and unconditionally,” according to a 2017 report by digital rights group Article 19. Under Rogozov’s leadership, reports also mounted that UK users were being arrested for the posts or memes they shared on the website. platform. Until 2021, most of the UK users punished under Russia’s anti-extremism laws were targets of xenophobic message sharing, said Maria Kravchenko, head of the anti-extremism abuse board at the Russian NGO SOVA. But activists were also affected. In 2015, convicted 26-year-old Darya Polyudova was sentenced to two years in prison for three UK posts. One read: “Not a war in Ukraine but a revolution in Russia!”
In response to the arrests, VK made privacy changes in 2018, hiding details about which accounts had shared messages and allowing users to make their profiles private. An employee who worked at VK at the time said these changes were made partly to protect the public, but partly to protect VK’s reputation. At the same time, UK became more compliant with the government, US services such as Instagram and WhatsApp became more and more popular in Russia. Developers working at VK at the time described feeling as if they were constantly catching up. “Every time Facebook or Instagram or WhatsApp or someone else invented a new feature, we tried to replicate it,” said Alexey Storozhev, who was an iOS developer between 2014 and 2018.
But the reputational damage caused by the arrests was nothing compared to what was about to happen in Ukraine. In May 2017, the Ukrainian government banned UK and other online services such as the online network Odnoklassniki for “carrying information aggression and propaganda against Ukraine”. Overnight, VK lost about 14 million users, says Rogozov. “I think it affected us much more than all the regulation that happened later in Russia.”
By the end of 2021, VK had merged with Mail.ru, which was renamed the VK Group, and the company was cracking under the pressure to grow fast enough to compete with US alternatives. According to Statista, VK was overtaken by WhatsApp in the user number charts by the end of 2021. Instagram wasn’t far behind. In the months before the invasion of Ukraine, according to Rogozov, the company was again “struggling” and looking for investors. A former employee who was aware of the company’s financial position said what happened next was inevitable. “You have to choose investors to work with, and not that many of them can really invest in those kinds of resources,” they said. “The bigger you are, the more connected you are to the government. That’s how business works in Russia.”
“Looking back, [Kiriyenko’s appointment] was probably preparation for war,” says Enikolopov. If so, it would be the second time changes in the company’s management structure have coincided with events in Ukraine. In 2014, the same year pro-Russian forces intervened in Crimea, the pro-Kremlin oligarch Usmanov took control of VK. Two months after Kiriyenko took over, Russian tanks rolled across the border into Ukraine. Both cases also occurred because the company was struggling financially. The week after Durov was ousted in 2014, Sony, Universal and Warner all filed separate lawsuits against VK for illegal music. Before Gazprom took control of the platform in 2021, insiders told WIRED that the company was once again struggling to compete with US competitors and looking for investors.
A former employee likened VK’s fate to the (scientifically dubious) myth of the boiling frog: if a frog falls into boiling water, it will jump out, but if you put it in slow-boiled water, the frog won’t notice until it hits. too late. “I think the Russian people and everyone connected to the Internet are like this frog in normal water,” he says. “It started with one law to save our children from offensive information, and now people in Russia are in a situation where they can write the word ‘war’ on VK and spend 15 years in prison.”
