March 27, 2026

Pro-government channels lost 41% of their audience due to Telegram blocking. This is 2.5 times more than opposition channels

Since mid-March, authorities have been intensifying Telegram blocking. According to the international research project OONI, last Friday the share of anomalies in Telegram requests increased from 18% to 75%, and this percentage remains high. «Novaya-Yevropa» continues to monitor how this affects the audience of Telegram channels. We found that pro-government media lost 41% of views amid the blocking, while opposition media lost 16.5%. The partial transition of the pro-government audience to MAX does not compensate for the losses. Photo: Dmitry Lovetsky / AP / Scanpix / LETA. Last Friday, we published news that pro-government media suffered twice as much from blocking as opposition media. A week later, this gap has only widened – it can now be said that pro-government media have suffered 2.5 times more. The number of views per post in pro-government channels is rapidly declining – as of Monday (March 23), each post is read by an average of 41% fewer people than on an average Monday before the increased blocking began in mid-March. Regional channels have even greater losses – views have dropped by 45%. Opposition media suffered the least – their views decreased by 16.5%. Among pro-government media, «Ura.ru» lost the most views – it lost 58% of its audience. «Komsomolskaya Pravda» also has high figures – 52%. These two media outlets surpassed the previous anti-record holder – last week, the most affected channel was propagandist Solovyov, this week his losses amounted to 48%. In general, in the group of pro-government channels, views decreased for 14 out of 15 analyzed media – as a week ago, Readovka remains the only pro-government channel practically unaffected by blocking. Most other media outlets lost 35-50% of views per post. Regional media suffered even more than pro-government media, losing an average of 45% of views. Out of 105 channels, 89 saw a decrease in views, 15 remained unchanged, and one increased. The picture is drastically different among opposition channels – media managed to retain more than 83% of their audience, with losses of only 16.5%. Views significantly decreased for 7 out of 14 analyzed channels, while for the other 7, they almost remained unchanged. As we wrote earlier, the low drop in views for independent media cannot be fully explained by their readers living abroad: only 30% to 45% of the audience of such media outlets are outside of Russia, according to internal research by «Novaya-Yevropa». Partially, the decrease in Telegram views among pro-government channels can be explained by the audience switching to MAX. However, the number of subscribers in the state messenger is only 33% of the audience of these channels on Telegram (on average for pro-government channels), while the drop in Telegram views is 41%. Moreover, users complained that MAX automatically subscribes to propaganda channels and it is impossible to unsubscribe from them. In some major channels, the loss of views significantly exceeds the size of the audience that has moved to MAX – the number of subscribers to the channel «Pryamoy Efir • Novosti» in MAX is only 14% of subscribers on Telegram, while views on Telegram in this channel decreased by 36%. For RIA Novosti, only 24% of subscribers moved to MAX, and Telegram views decreased by 48%.