MOSCOW, May 6. /TASS/. The Russian Public Opinion Research Center discovered in a poll, which TASS has at its disposal, that almost half of Russians (48%) could barely imagine their life without the Internet.

"In a hypothetical situation, if the Internet vanished, this would fail to spark panic among half of users. If this occurred, 24% said that nothing would change in their life, and 27% said that the effect would be rather insignificant," according to the survey. "Still, to 48% it would be a serious challenge: this share has considerably grown since 2017 (32%); 37% admitted that their life would drastically change but they would find a way to get used to it, and 11% said that they could not imagine their everyday life without using the Internet."

According to the poll, the amount of internet users in Russia is rather high today with 84% of Russians using the Internet with some regularity. That said, 69% are on it daily, while 13% use it several times a week or a month, but 2% surf the net very rarely. Meanwhile, practically all young people aged 18-24 use the Internet daily (99%), while the highly educated make up 78% of active users and 73% are the well-to-do segment of the population. Geographically, Moscow and St. Petersburg residents and inhabitants of cities with over a million constitute the most active Internet users at 78%. A total of 16% of respondents use no internet resources.

The Russian state pollster carried out the survey on April 18, 2019, by telephone among a stratified dual-frame random sample of landline and mobile numbers of 1,600 adult respondents. The margin of sampling error does not exceed 2.5% with a 95% probability.