Russia’s ban on access to social media platforms including Instagram, Facebook, and X has cost its economy over £3.1bn ($4.02bn), an independent report found.
The ban, first implemented in March 2022 following Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, has been the most damaging internet restriction of its kind to any economy in the world in 2023, according to data analysis by global tracker Top10VPN.
Its annual report found that internet shutdowns by governments in 2023 cost an estimated £7.06bn ($9bn) to the world economy, with 196 outages in 25 countries analysed.
Russia was the single most affected nation, followed by Ethiopia and Iran, whose internet outages cost them £1.5bn ($1.96bn) and £722m ($920m) respectively. The Russian ban on Instagram, Facebook and X/Twitter was first implemented in February 2022 and continued into 2023 as a Russian court labelled Meta as “extremist”.
The move came in retaliation for the social network’s effort to place restrictions on state-owned media, including Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik, within the European Union (EU) and limit the dissemination of misinformation.
The longest-running total internet shutdown of 2023 was imposed by Indian authorities in Manipur and lasted over 5,000 hours. Mobile internet services were suspended in the northeast Indian state after ethnic clashes broke out between minority hill tribes, the Kukis and majority Meitei community in May last year.
Kukis, who enjoy protected status as minorities, protested against plans to extend that status to the Meitei community, who represent around 53 per cent of Manipur’s population. Doing so would have given Meitei access to the same benefits and quotas in government jobs and education as the minority tribes.
Over 200 people have been killed since the conflict broke out and nearly 60,000 have been forced to flee their homes.
According to the report, while the overall cost of internet went down by 67 per cent compared to 2022, the duration increased by 18 per cent, taking it to a total of 79,238 hours.
The researchers also found that about 50 per cent of government internet outages were associated with additional human rights abuses in 2023, most frequently restrictions on freedom of assembly.
“Government internet outages typically take the form of total internet blackouts or social media blocks,” said the report’s authors Samuel Woodhams and Simon Migliano. “Another censorship tactic is internet throttling, where internet speeds are restricted so severely that anything beyond simple text-based communication becomes impossible, such as live-streaming video of protests or human rights abuses.”
“This kind of deliberate disruption is internet censorship in its most extreme form,” the authors note. “Not only do these internet outages infringe on citizens’ digital rights but they are also acts of national economic self-harm.”
