The contagion of example

Denys Krasnikov reports in KyivPost:

Ukraine will block access to the Russian websites VKontakte, Yandex and Odnoklassniki — all hugely popular in the country — under new sanctions measures.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko signed a decree on May 16 blocking access to the websites…

it’s probably worth noting that VKontakte and Odnoklassniki are social network portals while Yandex is above all a search engine popular with users in the Cyrillic segment of the Net. It also provides other Google-like services, including cloud storage, navigation maps, and an application for tracking public transport.

Yandex, VKontakrte and Odnoklassniki are the leading websites in Ukraine in numbers of daily users. VKontakte is the most popular social network in the country, and the Yandex web-search engine is second only to Google in use. More than 5 million Ukrainians log in to the Odnoklassniki social network every day.

Even Ukrainian President Poroshenko has official accounts on VKontakte and Odnoklassniki publishing his latest news — on VKontakte, he has 463,000 followers.

Five million out of Ukraine’s 45 is 11%.

I’ve written short bits about Russia’s continuing assault on Internet freedoms, which threatens to import the worst from China, Iran, and the Persian Gulf monarchies. Now Ukraine is blocking social networks, mail services, and a search engine. Next?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *