Since the war began in Eastern Europe, the world has changed a lot. Thousands of people have lost and continue to lose their homes in an instant, men go to the front, and women are forced to become refugees.
ASKfm social network team (a social network of questions and answers that has brought together 348 million users around the world, who exchange 600 million questions and answers each month) worked in Ukraine. The company’s offices are located in Kyiv, Dnepr and Zaporizhzhia. And employees worked remotely throughout Ukraine. War at one moment knocked on their door.
While shells were exploding outside the windows, the social network team did not stop work. “We knew that from the first minutes of the war we were already called to the information front.” Now ASKfm has already sent more than 6 million emails about the real circumstances in Ukraine to our users around the world. Mailing continues it’s pace and we believe that the truth cannot be hidden by any social media block attempt.
Anonymity in ASKfm will allow discussing the war without fear
We believe questions and answers are the essential building blocks of conversation. There is not much left in Russia, where people can still communicate freely. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tik-Tok are already blocked in the country.
Since the beginning of the Russian invasion, in ASKfm more than 1.5M questions, related to the events in Ukraine, have already been sent. The anonymous messaging opportunity allows people to express their opinion freely without fear of being imprisoned for up to 15 years, after Putin’s law about fakes.
The marketing team is actively working to deliver the most relevant content to users. At the same time, the moderation team monitors bot activity and blocks accounts created to spread fakes and incite hatred.
“Only in the first weekend after the start of the war, we received 24% more complaints specifically about Russian-language content compared to the previous weekend. Now the trend of increasing discussion of political topics is only growing.
Also, the number of complaints in Russian-speaking locations increased by almost a third. Because of the war, we’ve updated our moderation rules and started filtering out political discussions, in support of our country, of course.” – said Victoria, the Head of Moderation Team.
ASKfm joined the sanctions
One of our first steps since the start of the war in Ukraine was to make sure that not a single dollar earned at ASKfm was spent to support disinformation and Kremlin propaganda.
We immediately cut off advertising from all Russian publishers. None of our users will see ads from Russian companies like Yandex and Mail.ru.
At the same time we supported our Ukrainian ASKfm users. Since the beginning of the hostilities private premium chats are available for all users in Ukraine without restrictions! Private chats are the safest space for anonymous communication with any person in the application. Communication in such a chat is confidential, the dialogue is visible only to its participants, and the author can always remain anonymous.
Also the feature “Send a question to people around” helps to find aid or share information with people around. This feature is very helpful for volunteers, coordinators and those who are currently looking for accommodation.
ASKfm Team Support
Every day from 9 to 18 we work to make the ASKfm social network better. But now, at the same time we are coordinating volunteers, looking for medicines for those in need, sending humanitarian aid to the front, waiting to hear from loved ones from the front lines, collecting equipment for them and, of course, supporting each other.
You can express your support to the ASKfm team with a simple message here ask.fm/askfm
Note : It’s a Press release content provided by ASKfm Team
