07 August 2009

Is CYXYMU the first "digital refugee"?

TED Fellow, journalist and expert on political aspects of the Internet Evgeny Morozov, who spoke at TEDGlobal 2009 on web censorship, cyber-activism and the fallacy if "iPod liberalism," has a fascinating and thoughtful blog post about yesterday's social networking outages.

Responding to reports that the DDoS attack that downed sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Livejournal targeted one man, Morozov writes,

CYXYMY is not a crusading investigative journalist who produces breaking stories that challenge the regime; he's more of a pundit who has very articulate and predictably Kremlin-bashing views on the regional conflicts. His blog is also somewhat of a news hub: he has done an amazing job of keeping his followers in the loop as to what happens in Abkhazia and Georgia, the two regions that are not exactly in the center of media attention (even in Russia). [...]

Thus, I think that the attackers' real goal was humiliation, not censorship [...] A secondary  goal was to generate awe-inducing headlines about Russia's cyberpower all over the Web; there is no better way to do it these days than to make Twitter inaccessible for a few hours.

Morozov's whole article is worth a close read.

More TEDTalks about the powers -- and weaknesses -- of social media:
+ Clay Shirky on how social media can make history
+ Evan Williams on listening to Twitter's users

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