The Most Popular Facebook Posts in Wartime Russia
By far the most popular posts this week on Facebook in Russia are anti-war. The majority of the top 25 posts across Russian Facebook are by a Russian language media company stationed in Prague, Czech Republic called Current Time TV. The #1 most engaged with post across Russia is a video by a Russian Billionaire turned politician, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who lives in exile in London.
Using a social media insights tool called crowdtangle, which is owned by Meta, and gives journalists and publishers the ability to filter facebook posts by location and by ‘most shares’ or ‘most engagement’, and ‘most comments’ ect. We looked at the most engaged posts across Russia in the last 7 days. This means the posts that have the greatest combined shares, comments, and likes.
1. The most engaged post on Russian Facebook from February 24th – March 2, 2022:
1. This post by Russian billionaire in exile Mikhail Khodorkovsky is a video of him criticizing Putin and categorically denouncing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It has 7.6 Million views and has been shared over 200k times.
Here is what the post text says in English:
“Putin’s war with Ukraine
Today we are living through one of the most shameful pages of Russian history. Putin started an aggressive war with Ukraine. It is a crime. And Putin is a war criminal awaiting trial.”
You can see the original post for yourself right here.
The 2nd most popular post on Russian Facebook is a video of Putin, being fact-checked.
2. This post is by ‘Настоящее Время’ or ‘Current Time TV‘ which is a Russian-language television channel with an editorial office in Prague, created by the media corporations Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty with the participation of Voice of America. The channel – via RFE/RL – is funded through grants from the US Congress through the US Agency for Global Media.
Here is what the post text says in English:
“We debunk 6 fake things Putin uses to justify the invasion of Ukraine:”
You can see the original post for yourself right here.
The most popular meme being shared across Russia this week is of Putin Being ‘popped’.
3. The Most shared Facebook post by an individual (100k shares) and not by a publisher or politician, is this meme by a Russian journalist and music critic, Artemy Troitsky, who reportedly lives and teaches in Helsinki, and is an outspoken critic of Putin.
Here is what the post text says in English:
“Brilliant!! Kudos to the author (don’t know who): this is the best design!”
You can see the original post for yourself right here.
The next +20 most popular posts on Russian Facebook (according to crowdtangle) are all exclusively anti-war. But what does this mean? It does not mean we have a clear picture of what the average Russian citizen thinks of this war, for several reasons.
First, Facebook is not even close to the most popular social media app in Russia. Facebook itself said back in 2019, that it had 6.2 million users in Russia, a number dwarfed by the 70 million Russians who use ‘VKontakte’ (VK.com), the country’s most popular social networking website.
Second, it’s been widely reported that most Russians get their news from television or VK.com, both entities are owned and controlled by Russian Oligarchs friendly to Putin and the Kremlin or run by the Kremlin itself. In other words, the great majority of Russian citizens see completely different news than we see in the west.
Third, it is safe to say the news on Russian Facebook is almost exclusively coming from Russian speakers outside of Russia. Facebook currently blocks Russian state television from posting on Facebook channels, for example, if you try and see posts from ‘Russsian 1’, Russia’s biggest state-run television channels with 1.5 million followers on facebook, you get a warning pop-up that says,
“Russia state-controlled media. This link is from a publisher Facebook believes may be partially or wholly under the editorial control of the Russian government.”
When we asked Google to translate a ‘Russia channel 1’ page, Google simply says, “Can’t translate this page.”
It’s pretty clear what side of the information war Google and Facebook are playing for. Hint, it’s not Russia. This fact has added significance when you take into account that the only social media platform more popular than VK.com in Russia, is Youtube.com, which is owned by Google.
So how do we know what Russian news channels are saying? We watch Western news channels report on them. In this MSNBC interview, the Russian journalist (who works for the Daily Beast) explains how differently the war is being explained in Russia. Russian news calls the war a ‘peace keeping’ mission, where Russians are ‘liberators’ who are not bombing any Ukrainian civilians or cities and being greeted as liberators, not to mention there are many other even crazier narratives.
A US reporter asks a Russian reporter what is being played on Russian State-controlled news:
The BBC is actively translating Russian state television into English, the story of the war they are painting is drastically different than what is being reported in the west. You can see the full BBC coverage of Russian television here.
An example narrative from state-controlled Rossiya 24 news channel is that the Ukrainian forces are fascists using civilians as human shields:
“They (Ukranian forces) behave like fascists, in the very sense of this word: neo-Nazis put their hardware not just next to residential houses but where children take shelter in basements,” adds the correspondent in a video report captioned “Ukrainian fascism”.
On Rossiya 1 and Channel One – Russia’s two most popular channels, both state-controlled – Ukrainian forces are accused of war crimes in the Donbas region. The threat to civilians in Ukraine comes not from Russian forces, but from “Ukrainian nationalists”, says the Rossiya 1 presenter.
“They use civilians as a human shield, deliberately positioning strike systems in residential areas and stepping up the shelling of cities in Donbas.”
Channel One’s presenter announces that Ukrainian troops “are preparing to shell residential houses” and bomb warehouses with ammonia, in “acts of provocation against civilians and Russian forces”.
In conclusion, by and large the west is not seeing what Russian citizens are seeing, and Russian citizens by and large are not seeing what the west is seeing. We are living two, completely different wars. We will let you draw your own conclusions as to why Facebook is not eager to help spread Russian ‘disinformation’ these days, the Kremlin will have to do that with it’s own media outlets.
*Russian language posts in this article were translated into Engish using Google Translate.
