PORA Pauses Social Media Activities for Foreign Audiences

Photo: Trifonova Lubov/GeoPhoto.ru

PORA Pauses Social Media Activities for Foreign Audiences

The Project Office for Arctic Development announces its decision to stop updating its social media pages for English-speaking audiences, namely the pages of the Sustainable Development Laboratory on Instagram and Facebook (banned in Russia), as well as the PORA account on Twitter. In addition, daily posts by PORA CEO Alexander Stotskiy will not be available anymore in English.

On 4 March 2022, the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media made public its decision to block Facebook in Russia. The next day, Channel One reported that the mentioned governmental agency had also blocked Twitter. Instagram, which is controlled by Meta Platforms, the owner of Facebook, has not been blocked; however, there are numerous reports by Russian users of service disruptions and failures to connect to the Instagram network.

PORA acknowledges that our team is having trouble using marketing tools on all three mentioned social networks, including payment methods, setting up ad campaigns, campaign stats analysis etc.

In this light, from now on, PORA will be more active on the following platforms:

 — PORA on Telegram
— PORA on VK 
— PORA on OK 
— PORA on YouTube
— GoArctic.ru on Telegram 
— GoArctic.ru on Yandex Zen
— Polar Bear Learning Center on VK
— Good Job Center on Telegram 
— Arctic Volunteer on VK 

“Promoting development in the Arctic is the mission of the PORA Expert Center. We have no doubt that it is necessary to support the effort to attain the region’s development goals, including through providing an extensive coverage of the events of regional importance. However, at this moment, good news from Russia is hardly of interest to foreign audiences. The situation went so far that seven member countries of the Arctic Council, namely, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and the United States, pulled out of this international body. Russia is cut off from the global media space and is being excluded from the international dialog. We will be back when the situation returns to normal”, says Nikolay Doronin, the Chairperson of the PORA Managing Board.

Nonetheless, PORA considers an option of launching a daily newsletter highlighting key events in the Russian Arctic, provided that our readers from outside Russia show their interest in it. If you would like to subscribe to this newsletter, please send your e-mail via the feedback form below. 

In addition, PORA issues its weekly newsletter to update subscribers on the best articles and posts about the Arctic published at our web pages. Feel free to use the form below to subscribe.

5 March 2022