Photographer: Sefa Karacan/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Alexey Navalny, a former opposition candidate for Moscow mayor, was jailed for seven... Read More
Anti-government protesters in Russia followed along on Twitter as opposition leader Alexey Navalny live-tweeted his house-arrest violation
today. But the real action was on FireChat, where Navalny and his
supporters organized protests and exchanged unfiltered communication.
Open
Garden, the San Francisco startup that makes FireChat, says activity
from Russia has been spiking since yesterday, when Navalny urged his
followers to download the free app. FireChat was the top-trending search
on Apple’s App Store in Russia today. Downloads in the country began to
increase on Dec. 20 after Facebook blocked a page promoting an opposition rally, under pressure from the government’s communications regulator, according to Open Garden.
FireChat,
which lets users create chat rooms and communicate anonymously, has
become popular among protesters around the world. Aside from anonymity,
the app offers an advantage to those in politically unstable regions
because it works even when Internet service is down. FireChat uses a
technology available on newer smartphones, called mesh networking, that
facilitates wireless communication directly between devices. It uses a
combination of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi signals to connect with phones
running the app. Iraqis flocked to FireChat in June after unrest prompted an Internet shutdown, and protesters in Taiwan and Hong Kong used the app when wireless networks failed.
As President Vladimir Putin faces increasing dissent during Russia's worst economic crisis since 2009, he’s tightened his grip
on the flow of information online. Navalny, an adept social networker,
condemned his accelerated trial as a government attempt to silence him.
He announced his arrest today to his 16,000 followers on FireChat, where
his account has been verified by Open Garden. (Navalny has 868,000 followers on Twitter, where is profile is also verified.)
Since
the jump in downloads on Dec. 20, FireChat was the 29th most popular
social networking app for the iPhone and 79th for Android as of
yesterday, according to the most recent data available from researcher
App Annie. Christophe Daligault, the vice president of sales and
marketing at Open Garden, says FireChat ranks 10th among social
networking apps on the iPhone today—just above Twitter.
But
technology can only get you so far in Moscow at night, where winter
temperatures are below freezing. "iPhone 6 cannot handle -18c (0 degrees
Fahrenheit), keeps switching off,” wrote Ilya Mouzykantskii, a
freelance journalist covering the protests, on Twitter. “It’s really really cold.”
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