Russian Users See Political Reasons behind Suspension of a Russian Politician’s Twitter Account

Today quite a number of my Russian friends on Twitter are discussing terrible news: a Twitter account of a Russian politician (in fact, working right here in the city of Novosibirsk where I happen to live myself) has been suspended for what seems to be political reasons.

The account @sapelkin belongs to Vitaly Sapelkin, a local businessman who owns an auditing company and happens to be a member of the United Russia, the ruling party of the country that has been aggressively recruiting businessmen as well as major sportsmen and celebrities as its members hoping to further increase the support that the party is already enjoying (provided that you believe the election results, that’s it).

The businessman has a website specifically created for his political activities (in Russian) – it hosts his biography (very poorly written which suggests that he does not have any professional political PR support), a blog (not really updated frequently), some news, a form to send questions and requests for citizens and even links to his Twitter account and the latest tweets on the home page. The problem is that if you click the link right now, you will get directly to the standard suspended account page.

I have not been following the account as I get enough local news from one website that I regularly check for my weather forecast and also I have not heard of him before anyway so I can’t tell exactly what the updates were about. Google search within Twitter retrieves numerous retweets by a handful of users of Sapelkin’s thoughts on democracy, local government and Russian politics in general.

Recently Mr. Sapelkin informed his subscribers about leaving for Strasburg to participate in the 5^th Summer University for Democracy of the Council of Europe that took place over the course of last week. Apparently from there he sent updates to his Twitter account, probably quoting something regarding the state of democracy in Russia. In fact, being the member of the United Russia, Mr. Sapelkin is obviously supposed to support whatever trends in democracy we face here – no matter how democratic the country may seem from within or from outside (not probably the worst in the world but hardly actually democratic in my opinion either).

And once his account on Twitter got suspended, immediately numerous Russian Twitter users started to tweet and ask for retweets about the state of democracy in the Western world where the voice of Russian democracy is now silenced by Twitter owners for sharing his opinion with the world. And while I generally tend to love various conspiracy theories and would have enjoyed some digging into who exactly requested Twitter to suspend this not very visible and not exactly popular Twitter account, I’d really prefer to suspect some simple PR mistakes here resulting from not knowing how to handle social media at all.

So basically I see two possible scenarios here – and both have tons to do with an election campaign and nothing to do with democracy. The first is that he has hired someone to handle social media activities for him and inspire younger internet users to vote for Mr. Sapelkin because of his online activities and transparency. But unfortunately I happen to know that various social media experts and consultants don’t always think about ethics when they plan social media campaigns (and of course they almost never do in Russia where social media is still such a new venture for the majority of those who decide to employ it). Of course the reason is obvious: their customers definitely want results for their money, not just some abstract impact or exposure. Everything should be measurable – and the number of Twitter followers is probably the easiest thing to measure.

And you do know why Twitter tends to suspend accounts? Because the system notices unusual activities that suggest spam, like many users reporting spam from a specific account or blocking it or an account aggressively following everyone around – in hopes to get some followers back (and probably unfollowing people after a few days to be able to follow more new people and to demonstrate a healthy following/followers ratio that would suggest the account is truly interesting and worth following). So I would not be surprised if a PR advisor of Mr. Sapelkin has decided to employ some sort of a script (or purchased a service from someone) and initiated a massive following campaign (which is partly confirmed by my friend’s comment that he has just started to enjoy the first politician among his followers and the politician’s account is already suspended) – hence the result.

Another scenario could be more sophisticated and could be targeting internet users directly with this measure because I suspect that the vast majority of people in Novosibirsk have never heard the name of the businessman who is now carrying out an election campaign in one of the districts (I have certainly never heard of him) and now that his account is claimed to be suspended directly by Twitter refusing freedom of speech to the Russian citizens, he could easily gain numerous new supporters and turn into a Russian internet hero overnight.

I’d certainly prefer to think that what we are seeing here is the cleverer second scenario because it could demonstrate real devotion to social media activities and the value that local politicians start to find in Twitter now that the Russian president has a verified account on the microblogging service as well. Yet of course while it is no wonder that various forms of Twitter manipulation are here ready to use by Russian politicians, I’d really prefer it to be a transparent platform where everyone is seen for what one actually is – and not for what one claims to be.