Twitter Attracts Russian Government Agencies
May 5 – The Federal Financial Markets Service (FFMS) has started publishing its news on the microblogging service Twitter.
“We registered an FFMS account and the first news about Instruction of Derivative Financial Tools has been published,” said FFMS chief Vladimir Milovidov yesterday.
The Federal Financial Markets Service is the second Twitter-established Russian government service after the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS), which started microblogging on April 9 this year.
“We want our information to be broadly established and easy accessible by the general public, that’s why we decided to test Twitter,” the FAS official had earlier explained, “If this blog will generate demand, we will make a large blog in this social net.”
“You can find not only individuals in this social net, but also companies, and state services,” said Milovidov explaining his decision to Vedomosti.
“I’ve been impressed to find U.S. Security and Exchange Commission pages over there. This gave me an idea to open up the FFMS account,” he said while adding that the main reason to open an account was broadening audience reach. “
The newspaper Kommersant reported that the president of Russian Federation, Dmitry Medvedev can join two state services in Twitter soon. In the beginning of April, administrators for the president asked the microblogging service to cancel the so-called Medvedev account on Twitter as it was not his official account. At that time, the president’s press office promised that Medvedev would start his own Twitter microblog soon.
While Vladimir Putin’s press-secretary Dmitry Peskov has said that there is no particular regulation against joining the social network for cabinet employees, he assured the press that Putin had no plans to register in Twitter. “We have an official prime-minister web site, which is quite enough,” Peskov said.
According to data from Nielsen, by the end of 2009, 38.4 billion Twitter accounts had been created worldwide. There are currently about 183,000 Russian’s using Twitter.
