The answer of the Levade Internet community: only 4% of respondents consider restrictions on the Web necessary

Earlier, I published the post "Levada": only 5% of citizens of the Russian Federation consider restriction of information on the Internet unacceptable. Our alternative poll. " Currently, I present the results obtained during the study of the opinion of the Habr community regarding the stated problem and summarize their results.
But first, a small digression - why I decided to conduct a similar alternative survey.

On May 12, a press release from the Levada Center on the results of a survey on the subject of “Internet restrictions” was widely distributed across the media.

Mostly online publications on this occasion were full of headlines: “ Internet regulation has more supporters than opponents"," Russians are not against censorship on the Internet "," Internet regulation consider only 5% of Russians unacceptable "," Russians do not need freedom on the Internet ", etc.

Later, Levada posted the detailed results of the survey on its portal .

To put it mildly, I was alarmed by the data presented by the analytical center, is it really that only 5% of web users really need freedom and access to information on the Internet without restrictions imposed from above?

Having studied the numbers, I was surprised at a number of points.
For example, what was asked "for the Internet" and those who did not hear about it and did not use it. Or, for example, 90% of the respondents do not know about the law on bloggers discussed in the survey among those who do not use the Internet, and further they are asked about their attitude to this law!
The obscure figures and figures were perplexed, especially that only 5% of respondents (of those who use the Internet) and 3% of those who do not use expressed completely unacceptable restrictions on disseminating information on the Internet according to the Levada poll.

In a word, all of this prompted the idea of ​​organizing an alternative poll on the same issues, but already directly in the Internet environment.

No, I was not going to make an absolute relevant sample for all sections of the Russian population, but I had the idea to show that there was no need to substitute concepts and speak for the Internet community with opaque survey results presented - it can speak for itself and more definitely!

First, a survey was organized within the RosKomSvobody group on the VKontakte social network, so to speak, to initially study the opinion of the target audience, here are the results of the survey:


( link to the survey )

Next, similar polls that were conducted at the same time on the Web were studied, here are a couple of examples:

Hopes & Fears: Is it necessary to regulate the dissemination of information on the Web?


( link to the survey )

Computer Bild: Do you support the law on bloggers?


( link to the survey )

For all the data from the polls conducted by different sources with different audiences, the results are quite similar and predictable - the vast majority of respondents everywhere oppose new laws to restrict access to information.

But it was decided to make an even more accurate sample with better and quantitative indicators.

It seems to me that Habrahabr is quite suitable for this role, as the largest community of IT specialists in Runet and representatives of related specialties (programmers, designers, analysts, journalists, copywriters, representatives of telecom operators, registrars, hosting companies and other specialties of the Internet sphere) .
"Habrahabr" is also one of the largest communities of the entire Runet with an average daily attendance of about 1 million people.

But let us recall the indicators of the survey sample from Levada: The
survey was conducted on April 25-28, 2014 on a representative all-Russian sample of urban and rural population among 1602 people aged 18 years and over in 130 settlements of 45 regions of the country. Distribution of answers is given as a percentage of the total number of respondents along with data from previous surveys. The statistical error of the data from these studies does not exceed 3.4%.

For a number of parameters, our survey was even more in-depth: The
survey was conducted from May 12 to May 18.
Age: from 17 years and older.
The survey involved 8648 people.
From 43 regions of Russia.

Votes are being accepted at present, but the vast majority answered in the early days of the survey.

The questions for our alternative survey and the answers to them are identical to those that were formulated by Levada, so that you can make direct correlations between these surveys and compare them with each other.

4680 people from among the respondents indicated their age:



Well, the actual results of the survey:



The question about the distribution of votes by population of the respondent’s residence was later added to the questionnaire and was additional and optional - therefore, only 756 people answered it, and it can be omitted, but we’ll also give it for review:



What we see from the presented results: 63% of respondents consider restrictions in the Internet environment to be completely unacceptable, and only 4% of those who believe that they are necessary.

The data we collected is diametrically opposed to the data of Levada, and at the same time they are no less legitimate for Internet users.

Users on the Levada portal themselves expressed the opinion that the data presented turned out to be very ambiguous - this is the opinion of those who studied the poll and participated in the vote on its outcome on the Levada portal itself:
About 80% of the respondents indicated that the data presented were controversial center.

I do not want to say that the figures obtained as a result of our research are the ultimate truth.
But think tanks need to go deeper into conducting such surveys and not substitute the opinions of Internet users themselves for their results.