Facebook Instagram users decreased by more than 40% in ten days of blocking, and Instagram by 16% in one day, according to RBC on Mediascope research.
Mediascope research company, at the request of RBC, calculated the daily audience of the most popular social networks in Russia from February 24, the beginning of the special operation in Ukraine, to March 15. It takes into account the number of Russians who visited a particular site for at least a minute during the day or used its mobile application.
The very next day after the start “special operationsFacebook’s traffic has been slowed down by Roskomnadzor in accordance with the decision of the Prosecutor General’s Office — the day before this social network restricted access to the accounts of four Russian media outlets. On March 4, Facebook was completely blocked in Russia. In addition, since March 1, Roskomnadzor has again begun to slow down Twitter, and on March 11 announced that it would block Instagram from the 14th.
After Facebook was blocked, millions of Russians still use this network, according to Mediascope data. But the audience could not but decrease: if on February 24 it exceeded 9.6 million people over 12 years old, then on March 5, on the second day of the lock, it was already 9 million, and on March 10-15 it was 5.5-6.9 million people, depending on the day.
Instagram’s maximum daily audience for the last three weeks was recorded on March 14, the first day of blocking. Then almost 40.9 million Russians entered the application or the website. The next day, the number of Instagram users has already decreased by more than 16%, to 34.2 million Russians.
Against the background of the massive popularity of VPN services, the blocking of the most popular of them has begun in Russia. According to Alexander Khinshtein, about 20 VPN services in Russia are currently blocked. Currently, two of the most popular free VPN services are completely blocked – Nord VPN and Cloudflare Warp. In the near future, the list of blockages will be expanded, up to a complete ban on the use of VPN at the legislative level.
Recall Securitylab.ru recommends using a reliable VPN service from our friends – hidemy.name . And subscribers of our Youtube channel can get annual subscriptions for free by commenting on our videos. According to estimates SecurityLab.ru any blockages will lead to a 35-50% drop in the audience of the blocked resource in the next 2 weeks. If free VPN solutions are banned, the blocking percentage will increase to 50-70%. If Roskomanzor starts blocking paid VPN solutions or the entire protocol, then no more than 10-15% of users will be able to solve the problem of bypassing such locks.
The continued user activity despite the restrictions is due to the proliferation of VPN services that allow access even to blocked resources. In the first week of the military conflict alone, mobile users downloaded more than 5 million times the means of bypassing locks in the Apple Store and Google Play app stores.