The poor-taste police How an online community’s controversial response to a popular singer’s death outraged Russia

One of Russia’s most controversial, most popular communities online—a group on the social network VKontakte called MDK—is having a tumultuous week. When celebrity Jeanna Friske died of brain cancer on June 15, MDK published a joke in questionable taste, posting a “demotivator” that adapted a lyric from one of her songs. The tune, a corny hit from 2006, began, “Now I’d never been in Malinki before this day—not before this very evening.” In MDK’s adaptation, the lyric reads, “Now I’d never been in a grave before this day—not before this very evening.” (In Russian, the words “Malinki” and “grave” are very similar.) As a result, more than 137,000 people have signed an online petition calling for the group to be closed and its administrators to be prosecuted criminally; members of parliament have also appealed to police to shut down the community; and VKontakte has deleted the joke and removed MDK from a lucrative advertising platform. What happened?

MDK has a history of upsetting people. In October 2013, the group launched a widely-criticized campaign to “collect likes” for a colorfully worded image mocking an attack by a suicide bomber on a bus in Volgograd that killed seven people and injured dozens. MDK later deleted the joke, but not before Duma deputy Mikhail Margelov threatened Pavel Durov, then the head of VKontakte, with extremism charges for hosting the community. MDK’s administrators even tried to sue Margelov for slander, though the case never went anywhere.

Today, the pressure from lawmakers is coming again from Margelov, as well as two members of the Duma’s committee on cultural issues, celebrities Mariya Kozhevnikova and Joseph Kobzon. Kozhevnikova has emphasized the large number of signatures on the Change.org petition against MDK, saying, “all this serves as reason enough to appeal to Roskomnadzor [Russia’s media watchdog agency] and the Attorney General.” Kobzon, meanwhile, says the matter should go directly to Vladimir Putin, calling MDK “true filth.”

Kozhevnikova bases her appeal to police on the thousands of complaints submitted by individuals, including the Change.org petition that currently has more than 137,000 signatures. In a report last week for the news agency RBC, Darya Luganskaya found that Change.org is in fact a favorite tool among publicists for promoting stories in the Russian news. According to Luganskaya’s work, public relations experts frequently launch petitions on the website, inflating the number of signatures with bot networks, in order to draw the news media’s attention, thereby creating publicity for a particular cause.

Change.org says its system has not identified a single suspicious signature on the petition against MDK. “I think this petition is an example of a viral emotional response to the death of the singer and an inappropriate joke made around it,” a source at Change.org told Meduza. The website says it even contacted the petition’s author, Yana Kudryavtseva, who also authored a second petition asking Russia’s biggest television station, Channel One, to organize a fundraiser marathon to collect donations for child cancer patients, in honor of Jeanna Friske. That second petition already has more than 88,000 signatures, none of which Change.org says are suspicious.

Curiously, neither the petition nor Russian lawmakers specify what exactly is illegal about MDK’s joke, focusing instead on the moral offensiveness of mocking a beloved celebrity. Critics have also highlighted the community’s enormous, largely young audience. In August 2013, for instance, MDK told the website Siliconrus.com that it had a monthly following of 5.6 million people—46 percent of whom were underage.

On June 19, after deleting the joke, VKontakte responded to the public uproar by removing MDK from its unified platform for advertisements, the website’s central hub for placing sponsored content, where individuals and businesses can reach out to specific communities to buy ad space. If MDK wishes to continue earning commercial revenue, it will now have to make arrangements with advertisers independently.