Putin had bombs planted in Russian cities, had his opponents jailed and assassinated and ordered the bombardment of Chechen, Syrian and Ukranian cities. But I'm pretty sure he didn't lock anyone out of their MailChimp account.
Did Putin personally send millions of refugees out of Ukraine? No, but he ordered the invasion and bombardment. And that's what lead to it happening.
Did Putin personally supply Ukraine with German defensive weaponry? Ditto.
Did Putin personally do whatever blowback occurs? Ditto.
Evacuating refugees and supplying weapons to Ukraine helps save civilian lives. What exactly does locking out OP from his mailing lists achieve?
Far from being blowback, this is virtually zero cost, zero impact corporate virtue signalling.
Leave behind an economic scorched earth to hopefully deter future wannabe warmongerers from deciding to war monger.
Sorry for OP but tbh, his pain is nothing compared to literally dying as many Ukrainians are right now.
Right, because it's small tech blogs that are the backbone of the Russian economy, not its state owned energy companies which still continue to sell to Europe.
> literally dying as many Ukrainians are right now
I mean sure, it's great perfomative activism but how exactly does cancelling OP helps them?
The EU has quite detailed and widespread plans to fuck up the Russian economy on a near permanent basis. They'd basically already done so by taking climate change seriously while Putin tried to pretend it wasn't happening, now they're hitting fast-forward on that plan and specifically targeting Russian carbon first.
Russian coal and oil is the easy bit to do and it hurts Russia more, so they're doing that first. It's like shouting at someone with a sniper rifle, "why don't you come out and fight me like a man?". Because it would be strategically unwise and totally unnecessary in order to beat you, is one potential answer.
But as to your point, yes - I also think this is mostly virtue signalling - you'd need to lock the columns of the government's power out, i.e. specifically target any members of police/government institutions/military (Edit: as private persons, not only at their workplace).
Edit2: Also, specifically targeting only them has a much larger effect than blanket-banning everyone. But I guess it's technically unfeasible without resorting to nation state levels of intelligence resources.
I think the nuance is that you don't only care about civilian lives. Even peace may be purchased at too high a price. The government of Ukraine thinks that loss of sovereignty is a much higher price to pay.
As to what it achieves, well at the very least it's conveying some information that Russians won't be getting via their usual media.
Why is my blog down? Oh because my country is murdering innocent people again.
I thought people who used the phrase 'virtue signaling' liked and supported Putin? So kind of confusing to use it to critique actions taken against him and try to excuse him from blame for the consequences.