More than Half of North Caucasians Now Rely on Social Networks for News and Information, New Poll Finds

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Dec. 15 – Ethnic activists in the North Caucasus have long insisted that the Internet is playing a key role there not only in weaning their peoples away from Moscow but also in uniting them and perhaps especially importantly in linking them with their diasporas abroad (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2019/04/circassian-national-movement-saved-and.html and  windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2020/09/circassians-in-homeland-and-abroad.html).

            Now, a new poll conducted by the Center for Monitoring Public Opinion at the North Caucasus Federal University has confirmed just how large that Internet presence is in a region often thought to be far behind the rest of the Russian Federation when it comes to the use of and sophistication about the Internet (https://kavtoday.ru/article/6739).

            The survey of 1200 adults in the North Caucasus region found that 56 percent of them say that the Internet is now their chief source of information. And sixty-nine percent of respondents say that they rely regularly on the Instagram social network. Such Internet penetration means that Russian tv and radio are no longer the primary definers of opinion there.

            But for analysts of the political situation in the North Caucasus, it means something else: they must now devote more attention to Internet sites based abroad and using both the language of the peoples they are directed at as well as Russian than they have commonly done up to the present.

            And it also means that Moscow is likely to be seeking to block such sites ever more frequently than it did in the past when it too dismissed them as of concern to only tiny groups of intellectuals. They now have a mass audience; and that must be worrisome to a Kremlin already disturbed by unrest and instability there.