Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy spoke about the fate of Threads in Russia

2023-07-07 14:14:27

The new application of the Meta Corporation (recognized as extremist in the Russian Federation and banned) Threads in Russia is de facto subject to technical blocking. This was stated by Deputy Chairman of the Committee on Information Policy of the State Duma Anton Gorelkin.

Gorelkin specified that Threads is seriously integrated with Instagram, which belongs to Meta and is blocked in Russia, and has a common user base and server infrastructure with this social network.

“Therefore, without the help of a VPN, Russian users cannot access this service right now. That is, the technical blocking of this service is de facto taking place,” thinks Gorelkin (TASS quote). According to the deputy, the new application can turn into “another weapon of the information war” very soon.

At the moment, the application is downloaded from the App Store without a VPN. After that, it is proposed to enter the application through Instagram – at this stage, it is not possible to enter Threads without a VPN, the Vedomosti correspondent was convinced.

Earlier in Roskomnadzor TASS declaredthat the Threads app can operate in Russia subject to Russian laws. The department added that Internet sites visited by users from Russia should promptly remove “socially dangerous content and counteract the spread of destructive materials.”

The Threads Meta service launched on the night of July 6th. You can log in to the social network through your Instagram account. From the description of Threads, it follows that the service is designed for text messaging. Outwardly, the service is similar to Elon Musk’s Twitter. According to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the app has already been downloaded more than 30 million times in less than a day.

The day before it became known that after the launch, Twitter lawyer Alex Spiro sent a letter to Zuckerberg accusing the company of “systematic, willful and misappropriation of Twitter trade secrets and other intellectual property.” Meta called these accusations groundless, specifying that there are no former employees of the Musk social network in the Threads development team. Musk himself commented on the news about the launch of Threads with the phrase “competition is good, fraud is not.”