Over the past month, in parallel with the aggressor’s efforts to restrict the use of not only “Facebook” with “Instagram”, but also “WhatsApp” with “Telegram”, the population of Russia and the Russia-occupied territories began to be massively imposed on the “new Russian national messenger” “Max”. Since the population had no rational reasons to install the new application, the traditional “administrative resource” and propaganda were used.
On the occupied peninsula, “officials” and “budget employees”, as well as “students” and, through children in “schools and kindergartens”, their parents are forced to install “Max”. Also, the other day, the “federal authorities” demanded that “management companies” urgently transfer all house chats of residents of apartment buildings to “Max”.
Against this background, what became tragicomic were not so much the reports in the “Crimean press” that “trusting pensioners” were being swindled by scammers already in the new messenger, but also the fact that the entire “regional government”, both in Simferopol and Sevastopol, and locally, and its “information service”, did not start their own propaganda channels in “Max” during the entire month of hysteria about the messenger.
At the same time, the central Kremlin propaganda has already been in “Max” for about a month, but the number of subscribers is at the level of a regional news site. For example, as of August 13, “TASS” had 23 thousand subscribers in “Max”, and they were able to drive a little more than 3 thousand readers to the “party channel” of “United Russia”.
The “silence of the lambs” regarding the absence of profiles in “Max” from the occupation “authorities” received a simple explanation: it turns out that until August 13, there was no order for them to “join Max” from the “highest authority” – the specialized regional and information departments of the Kremlin dictator’s administration.
Having received this go-ahead yesterday, namely the “state task: to create a priority information system in Max”, governors in Russia itself began to hastily announce the channels they were creating in “Max”, and it is extremely likely that in the coming days the Crimean and Sevastopol gauleiters will make exactly the same “sudden coming out”.
The implementation of this “ultimate task” will be supervised by the Kremlin sanctioned structures “Dialogue” and “Dialogue Regions”, headed by Vladimir Tabak, the former “overseer of the Internet” in that very Kremlin presidential administration.
On the occupied peninsula, the so-called “director of the Regional Control Center” Alexander Makar, a former Simferopol journalist who served Russian propaganda from 2014 to 2019 and then twice flashed in the criminal role of “deputy head of administration” of occupied Simferopol, has become “the man from Tabak” since 2023.
The coming months will show what these figures will do with the newly-minted tool of propaganda and total control in the form of “Max”.
