New Russian Unrest Faces Down Putin Government On Social Networks
BY Miranda Neubauer | Friday, December 9 2011
Russian social media network Vkontakte.ru refused a request from the Russian Federal Security Service to block online activities of opposition groups in the aftermath of the country's controversial parliamentary elections, Dow Jones reported:
“Over the last couple of days the FSB has asked us to block opposition groups, including yours,” the founder of VKontakte, Pavel Durov, said in a message exchange with a blogger who supports anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny. Mr. Durov said, however, that his site as a rule would not block the protesters.
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Mr. Durov told the blogger, known as “edvvvard” on the U.S.-based LiveJournal blog-hosting service, that VKontakte is a “100% apolitical company that does not support either those in power, the opposition or one of the parties.” Edvvvard could not immediately be reached for comment.
Still, Vladislav Tsyplukhin, a spokesperson for Vkontake, said that the FSB was not putting pressure on the social network. FSB declined to comment to Dow Jones about the reported requests.
Security experts said Thursday that thousands of fake Twitter accounts were created to drown out tweets by the Russian opposition.
Protesters had started expressing their outrage at the arrest of Navalny using a hashtag that transliterates into English as Triumfalnaya, which quickly became one of the most-tweeted hashtags on Twitter, according to Brian Krebs:
But according to several experts, it wasn’t long before messages sent to that hashtag were drowned out by pro-Kremlin tweets that appear to have been sent by countless Twitter bots. Maxim Goncharov, a senior threat researcher at Trend Micro, observed that “if you currently check this hash tag on twitter you’ll see a flood of 5-7 identical tweets from accounts that have been inactive for month and that only had 10-20 tweets before this day. To this point those hacked accounts have already posted 10-20 more tweets in just one hour.”
Meanwhile, supporters of the Russian opposition movement are working on organizing demonstrations of solidarity around the world with the website fairvoteforrussia.org , Facebook and Vkontakte serving as a focal points. Demonstrations are planned in Europe, New York City, other American states and Asia.
Vladimir Putin has blamed Hillary Clinton for provoking the Russian protests.