Western far-right groups started migrating to the Russian Internet after being banned on Facebook

There are already more than a hundred neo-Nazi groups with community pages on Vkontakte, Russia’s most popular social network. The groups’ subscribers are users in Russia, the U.S., Germany, Sweden, and other countries. There are also a few dozen hate groups on Vkontakte created and populated entirely by foreigners. Some of these pages have as few as 30 members, and others have up to a few thousand.

A man who identified himself as “Henry from Houston,” the founder of two far-right Vkontakte groups created for foreigners, said that he first registered on the Russian social network in June 2016. “I was brought here by Facebook’s internal censorship. The terms of service there have a lot of things you’re not allowed to talk about or post about. For example, alternative opinions about the Holocaust, Jews, racism, Masonry. You can’t even write anything about Adolf Hitler,” Henry complained.

Meanwhile, the Russian authorities have blocked the registration of a .RU domain for a US neo-Nazi site, The Daily Stormer.