Social networks pose challenge to Putin When Alexei Venediktov wanted to alert the public to a crackdown at a veteran Moscow news outlet this month, the 56-year-old radio editor took an approach he knew would guarantee immediate attention. He posted the news to his 85,000 followers on Twitter. Within the hour, thousands of Russian bloggers were scrutinising why Ekho Moskvy's owner, the Kremlin-connected Gazprom Media, had decided to shake up the radio station's board - a torrent that prompted both Gazprom and the Kremlin to swiftly issue assurances of the broadcaster's editorial independence. A day later, when Mr Venediktov sent a tweet announcing that prosecutors had suddenly called him in for questioning, he elicited an even stronger response, prompting authorities to close the inquiry the same day without explanation. Vladimir Putin's Kremlin is suddenly waking up to the fact that Russia's media landscape is not the one he inherited in 2000. While fears of a clampdown on liberal media outlets are growing, the speed and flexibility of social networking technology pose a more complex challenge to state control than traditional media. Since 2007, the number of Russian internet users has jumped from 22.8m to 52.9m, while the number of people using the popular blogging platform LiveJournal has risen from 1.3m to 5.8m. More than 13m Russians use Facebook. The shift is crucial to explaining the way Russian opposition sentiment spread following alleged vote rigging in the December parliamentary election. With a week to go before the presidential election on March 4, internet groups say they have seen an increase in interference from both official and unofficial pro-Kremlin organisations, concerned about the boom in online political discussion. Russia's federal security service has asked popular social networking site VKontakte, which translates as "In Contact," to block certain groups and events associated with anti-government protests, Pavel Durov, the site's founder, disclosed in December - requests that VKontakte refused. Other websites, including LiveJournal, the country's most popular blogging platform, have faced a wave of "distributed denial of service attacks," where they are flooded with more traffic than their servers can handle, in the lead-up to the elections. This month Kommersant, a daily newspaper, announced it had traced one of these attacks back to Nashi, a pro-Kremlin youth group. Nashi denied it was behind the attacks. Mr Durov and VKontakte declined to comment further on the matter, as did Mail.ru, Russia's largest web portal, which owns a 40 per cent stake in VKontakte. This stance is similar to that of its peers, which have tried to strike a delicate balance between maintaining good relations with the authorities and the image of independence for their users. Ilya Ponomarev, chairman of the parliament's high-tech development subcommittee and a member of the opposition party A Fair Russia, says internet companies "choose for themselves whether to react or not ... Because there are no legal instruments, it is more like self-censorship. Yet Anton Nossik, a popular blogger and former chief executive of Russian search engine Rambler, says several groups have found themselves trapped by law enforcement agencies, which often try to establish an informal relationship through frequent visits to the company and then make unsanctioned requests. "Some small law-enforcement character writes you an informal letter requesting certain information," he says. Legally I shouldn't be providing it. If I do provide it, this could be grounds for the same authorities censoring me later for mismanagement of personal data. Indeed, they would like to have this leverage. For internet advocates such as Mr Ponomarev, the big concern is that Russia's internet executives will be "more interested in making money" than protecting their users - a particular concern around owners that have other business interests that could come under pressure from the Kremlin. For example, Alisher Usmanov, the oligarch who holds nearly one-third of Mail.ru, also owns a big iron ore producer and co-owns a mobile phone operator. Alexander Mamut, a tycoon and owner of LiveJournal, holds a controlling stake in the country's biggest mobile phone retailer. Marina Pustilnik, director of business development at LiveJournal's parent company SUP, says the company has battled concerns about Mr Mamut's allegiances since the billionaire bought the company in 2007. But the recent anti-Putin protests, she points out, have been good business for LiveJournal. In December the site saw a 50 per cent rise in the number of unique visitors. The blogs of opposition leaders saw sharp increases in traffic, such as Alexei Navalny's page which has been attracting 10,000 new subscribers a month, compared to 1,000 previously. Mr Navalny has created a following across multiple platforms, including LiveJournal and Twitter. And there lies the problem for the authorities, which analysts say face a tougher task than in the early 2000s. Moreover, the outright closure of popular sites would likely cost the regime dearly. According to one industry analyst, whose employer would not allow him to discuss the issue openly: "They know that if they take steps to clamp down on the internet they will lose more than they actually gain."