Propagandist Margarita Simonyan’s Telegram channel loses more than half its views after Russia blocks app
Views on propagandist Margarita Simonyan’s Telegram channel fell 52.3 percent in late March compared to late February, according to calculations by the Telegram channel ChTD (Chto i Trebovalos Dokazat, or “Q.E.D.”).
Among pro-Kremlin media outlets and bloggers on Telegram, only Kreml.Novosti (Kremlin.News) saw a steeper decline, with views falling 68.1 percent, ChTD found. Views on the Telegram channel of the Russian state propaganda outlet RT, which Simonyan heads, fell 42 percent.
Despite promotion of Russia’s state-backed messaging app Max, only a fraction of readers from pro-government Telegram channels have migrated to it, ChTD said. Full statistics on view trends in Max are unavailable, ChTD said, but according to the app’s own data, Simonyan’s posts averaged around 600,000 views in late February — with fewer than 130,000 subscribers — and fell to about a third of that figure by late March. The Telegram channel Mozhem Obyasnit (We Can Explain) reported that Simonyan currently has 537,000 subscribers on Telegram and around 165,000 on Max.
RT receives roughly 32–33 billion rubles a year from the Russian federal budget, the Telegram channel Mozhem Obyasnit said.
Independent outlets were largely unaffected. Their readers have long relied on VPNs and other circumvention tools, ChTD said. BBC Russia’s views fell just 9.1 percent over the same period, and Meduza’s dropped only 3.7 percent, ChTD reported.
In the second half of March, the independent Russian news outlet Novaya Gazeta Europe assessed the impact of the restrictions on Telegram channels belonging to pro-government and independent outlets. At that point, the outlet found that views on pro-government Telegram channels had fallen 23 percent, regional channels 25 percent, and independent outlets 10 percent.
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