Is the Russian government actively preventing their citizens from accessing non-government-approved news sources? Are they blocking them from the entire world wide web except for Russian sites?
Are Russian citizens able to get to online gaming platforms like WoW or Second Life?
SDMB Mods/Admins, do you have access to traffic info to see if any Russians are still visiting/using the SDMB, or if they ever did before the invasion?
We don’t have any tools I know of for location of traffic. There are or were places that checked this for Message boards, but it isn’t in our admin panel.
Russia has no control over the Internet use of its citizens per se, but what it can do is restrict use by its residents. As of last week, it’s blocked access to Facebook, Twitter, and several foreign and local media websites, including the BBC and Voice of America. It’s also made legal threats to the organizations behind TikTok and Wikipedia, though I don’t think it’s implemented any wholesale blocks of those sites yet. It’s certainly not blocking access to all non-Russian sites, nor would such a thing be easy to do. I’m in regular contact with colleagues in Russia through usual Internet-based channels (e-mail, instant messaging, etc.) and some of my more technically savvy colleagues are still communicating via Facebook (since if you know what you’re doing, it’s not too difficult to get around the blocks).
Wikipedia has a good overview of the current Internet restrictions in Russia that you might want to check.
Thanks, I really should have said “residents” rather than “citizens” in my OP.
Thanks for that link.
Even if they block the internet, nothing stops the people from firing up Old School modems and BBS software and sharing info that way, like in the 1991 coup attempt.
Well, except the passage of time. There were a lot more modems at hand in 1991.
They’re never going to block IP-based computer communications in general, since that would be social and economic suicide. In the most extreme case they’d make it difficult or impossible for their networks to interface with non-Russian ones, à la North Korea. But in that case, it would be much saner to use the existing Russian network for information sharing; no need to go back to the information stone age of dial-up modems. (In fact, nearly all of the remaining “dial-up” BBSes these days are run and accessed from IP-based gateways anyway.)
For what it’s worth, there continue to be lots and lots of Russians broadcasting via Twitch, as of the last time I checked a day or so ago.
One of them had wrapped his video insert/overlay (whatever it’s called) in a frame showing Ukrainian colors, but it’s unclear whether he’s actually in Russia or was just broadcasting in the Russian language from somewhere else. The others seem to be studiously silent on the topic, and as far as I could tell from the text chat, nobody was challenging their silence, probably because it’s understood that this would be a bad idea regardless of the reaction.
Are the troll farms still on the job? Obviously they’d be able to read foreign social media.