Coronavirus: virtual protests in Russia to protest containment

Text by: Daniel Vallot

Even if they remain marginal, as in the United States or Brazil, demonstrations broke out in Russia this week to denounce the confinement. But in the latter country, they take place not in real life, but on the internet.

Publicity

From our correspondent in Moscow,

Everything took place on Monday on a well-known site in Russia: Yandex Maps, a geolocation service that can be compared to Google Maps, very used by the Russians, and which allows geolocalized comments to report for example an accident or a traffic jam. This service was diverted from its original function to denounce the conditions of confinement .

Political messages around the Kremlin

It all started in the city of Rostov-on-Don, in the south of the country. Following serial boondoggles over the issuance of passes , furious Internet users began to leave messages on the application by calling local authorities to account. Very quickly, hundreds of messages appeared on the city map, all located around the building where these local authorities are located. 

► Also read: Coronavirus, the adversary who disarms Vladimir Putin

And this mobilization has snowballed in other Russian cities. No doubt thanks to the accelerating effect of social networks, several large cities have followed suit: Saint Petersburg in the North, Ekaterinburg in the Urals, Krasnoyarsk in Siberia, and of course Moscow the capital, where messages have been concentrated as it should be around the Kremlin, with increasingly political slogans, denouncing the inertia of the authorities in the face of the disease and especially in the face of its economic and social consequences.

"  Give us something to feed our children and we will stay at home  "

Because at the heart of this mobilization is the social distress caused in Russia by confinement. A slogan picked up by the Russian press sums it up fairly well: "  Give us enough to feed our children and we will stay at home." " 

Yandex did not give any figures, but the newspaper Kommersant tried to assess the mobilization for the virtual demonstration in Moscow, and the newspaper estimates at 5,000 the number of people who took part in the Moscow demonstration at 5 p.m. It should be noted that Yandex has not stopped deleting the messages appearing on the site as they were written.

Visit YouTube

The group then enacted new rules to avoid repeating this type of mobilization: from now on, messages can only be left where the user is when he writes. Unless therefore organize a real demonstration outside the walls of the Kremlin, it has become impossible to imagine a mobilization equivalent to that which took place on Monday evening.

That said, several opponents of Vladimir Putin are meeting next Tuesday, not on Yandex, but on YouTube for a new virtual demonstration. This will be followed of course and it will allow us to see if this new type of mobilization on the net can gain momentum or not in this period of confinement.

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• Russia
• Coronavirus
• Containment
• Internet

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