Yandex.Maps and Animal Crossing: how virtual meetings are held

Protests in the world

The first large protests in the virtual space began in Hong Kong. All

last year in the city they passed without stoppingHuge protests because authorities published a bill in February that would allow people from the city to be extradited to mainland China.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in Hong Kong,like almost all over the world, quarantine was introduced. Now, demonstrators hold their protests in video games, for example, in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and wait for the end of quarantine.

Protesters create banners in the game with the words “Free Hong Kong, revolution now” or print photos of Hong Kong’s head Carrie Lam and destroy them immediately.

Other pioneers of online ralliesthey became eco-activists and greens, who began to conduct Internet protests in March 2020, when the Swedish activist Greta Thunberg on her Twitter page stated that she was not going to leave home in the near future.

Likewise, the Climate Change Coalition planned to hold huge protests in April around the world. They have now been canceled or moved online.

The format of virtual rallies is gradually beginning to gain popularity around the world. Such protests have already been announced in many countries - for example, in Georgia. 

In Russia

The first virtual rallies against the regimeself-isolation took place in Rostov-on-Don on April 20 thanks to Yandex services. People used the “Conversations” function in the mobile version of Yandex.Maps and Yandex.Navigator, which allows them to put a point on the map and write a comment on it.

Residents of the city began to dot the buildinglocal government and write in virtual posters that due to the advisory nature of the emergency, many people who have lost their jobs cannot receive social assistance from the state.

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On Yandex maps in Rostov, people staged an online rally near the Government building

Publication from Rostov | News | Roads (@rostov_roads) Apr 20, 2020 at 5:18 PDT

A few hundred protest comments alsoit was said that the authorities needed to either introduce official quarantine, which would allow them to rely on state guarantees, or completely remove restrictions, since many people simply had nothing to eat and nothing to live on.

Following Rostov-on-Don, protest rallies inYandex.Maps began in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Yekaterinburg, Krasnoyarsk, Saratov, Ufa, Kazan, Cheboksary. Residents of these cities also complained about the measures introduced and the lack of an official emergency regime.

In addition, points with protest comments appeared on the maps of the 2GIS service in two cities - in Moscow and Novosibirsk.

Later from Yandex.Cart "comments began to disappear. According to company employees, moderators always delete comments if they are not related to the situation on the road. In addition, when a large number of comments appear, they begin to slow down the service and loading maps, so the time they are displayed on the map is automatically reduced, Yandex employees added.

Difficulties of conducting protests on the Internet

Activists admit that protestson the Internet - less significant than in real life, and the hashtags #ClimateStrikeOnline and #DigitalClimateStrike are much less noticeable than huge crowds on the streets. However, eco-activists plan, in addition to creating unified protest hashtags for social networks, massively send messages to people, telling them about global problems, and centrally write and call companies whose actions negatively affect the environmental situation, paralyzing their work.

At the same time, the main topic on the agenda now is the coronavirus and the economic crisis, which distract people’s attention from any protest rhetoric.