The following article by Katie Zavadski was posted on the Daily Beast website November 3, 2017:
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.
The migration began as early as 2016, when groups like the United Aryan Front flocked to VKontakte, the Russian equivalent of Facebook. But it has amplified in recent months after the white-supremacist rallies in Charlottesville, said Keegan Hankes, an analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center. Many white nationalists and organizations found themselves banned from U.S. social-media sites after the rallies, which climaxed when a white supremacist killed counterprotester Heather Heyer with his car.
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.
“After they got kicked off these platforms, they’re finding a new place to live,” Hankes told The Daily Beast. “You even saw some people self-deporting from these websites, going to places where their content would be safer.”
Last weekend, Alabama white nationalist Chad Bagwell told a reporter from The Tennesseanthat 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.
View the post here.