There is very little doubt just how important social media is to Internet users across the globe. That is why so many people were quite dismayed when Russia’s leading social network site was banned last Friday. While the ban was supposedly a mistake that was quickly rectified, the fact that Russia could ban a site like that raised quite a few eyebrows. In the United States, we are used to social media networks sort of wagging the dog, instead of being the tail that gets wagged.

When Twitter (News - Alert) recently saw a one-hour outage, most social media users stood up and took notice. That outage was not something that the government controlled but was an internal problem.  Pinterest grabbed enough headlines for people to take notice when it just made a few changes that affected the way it does business. A social media site going completely offline, especially because of a government decision, is something that always worries people.

The social networking site, VKontakte, which boasts more than 210 million registered users, was put on a “black list” that barred the site from distributing content throughout Russia. A few hours later that ban was lifted and the government claimed that the whole blacklist issue was nothing but an oversight. That explanation was not well-received, partly because the owner of the site, Pavel Durov, has butted heads with the government in the past.

Durov’s latest run in with the law came last month, when he claimed that he was wrongly accused of being at fault in a traffic accident that slightly injured a cop. Reuters (News - Alert) reports that instead of fighting the allegations in court, Durov left the country. The Kremlin also recently purchased a 48-percent stake in VK, which has free speech advocates worried even more. At the moment, this isn’t a situation that is going to shake free speech advocates to their core, but it does demonstrate just how endangered popular websites are when dealing with restrictive governments.