Kicked off the U.S. social-media giants, white supremacists are finding a home on Russia’s VKontakte, where they are finding fellow travelers and fewer restrictions.
After a series of purges on Facebook and Twitter, white supremacists are seeking refuge on Russian social media.
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The shift to Russian social media shows just how difficult it is to contain radical groups on social-networking sites. Social networks face the same challenge with many forms of extremism: Jihadi groups, for example, turned to encrypted networks like Telegram after being thrown off Facebook and Twitter. Even there, their channels are repeatedly shut down, only to resurface. And white supremacists, too, are re-emerging on less restrictive and newer social networks.
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Last weekend, Alabama white nationalist Chad Bagwell told a reporter from The Tennessean that he’d heard about Saturday’s White Lives Matter rally in Tennessee on VKontakte, in an example of the migration.
VK, as the social network is commonly known, has looser speech restrictions—at least for certain kinds of hate speech.
“Even a lot of parties that are physically banned in Russia still have their VK groups,” Bagwell told The Daily Beast.
Some Russian activists are not as lucky. VK’s founder and former CEO, Pavel Durov, was deposed from the company in 2014, shortly after he refused the Kremlin’s invitation to block opposition candidate Alexei Navalny’s page and to hand over data on activist users to the Russian government. (Durov’s shares were bought up by allies of Russian President Vladimir Putin.)
But the racial division stirred up by white supremacists on VK fits right in with the Kremlin’s agenda. Recent revelations about Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential race show that trolls sought to pit different racial and religious groups against one another to sow discord.
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- Discussion
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The parallel reality of the Russian internet is recruiting. https://t.co/fTMcd8iu4e
— Molly McKew (@MollyMcKew) November 3, 2017
To be clear — VK is an FSB playground. Any group using it as a comms platform is handing all of the info/network to Russian intelligence. https://t.co/nYpe350Xye
— Molly McKew (@MollyMcKew) November 3, 2017
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