Seattle is the birthplace of grunge, Starbucks and LiveJournal, a blogging platform that has had a huge impact on the Internet. In 1999, a student at the University of Washington, Brad Fitzpatrick, thought it would be nice to keep a diary on the Internet and created LiveJournal, in the states, mostly teenagers wrote to LiveJournal (LJ). In Russia, LiveJournal has become the main platform for reflection on the fate of the fatherland.
Disclaimer. This article is a transcript of the wonderful film "Holivar" by Andrey Loshak. There are people who save time and love text, there are those who cannot watch videos at work or on the road, but are happy to read Habr, there are those who are hard of hearing for whom the audio track is inaccessible or difficult to perceive. We decided for all of them and you to decipher great content. Who still prefers the video - the link at the end.
Brad Fitzpatrick, founder of LiveJournal
“In the States, posts in LiveJournal looked like a child’s writing, in Russia they posted texts, well, just like in a newspaper. In the States, it was like a child typing on a keyboard, but you had long, serious texts and a lot of photos, but in the States, short ones, with a lot of mistakes, just sucks! But it was fun. We were just fooling around."
With the advent of Facebook, the popularity of LiveJournal began to wane, and continued to grow in Russia. LiveJournal has become a platform on which civil society was formed. Motorists who fought against the dominance of flashing lights on the roads were among the first to unite. The community was named "Blue Buckets".
Petr Shkumatov, coordinator of the Blue Buckets Society
“We were certainly amazed by this LiveJournal phenomenon. Some of our resonant stories, resonant posts, they were immediately reposted by a huge number of people and as a result we ended up in the top, even more people subscribed to us. When you are on a regular forum, you cannot raise a wave, but with the help of social networks, we began to succeed in raising a wave. Now there are about 600 flashing lights left, which is depressing, of course, but these are not the 20 special signals we started with.”
Following the civil activists, opposition politicians reached out to LJ, anti-corruption investigations of Alexei Navalny, made his blog the most popular in LJ, in the pro-government media the politician is still called a blogger.
Alexei Navalny, opposition leader
Starting from 2005-2006, when the media were already completely cleaned up and a couple of newspapers remained there, the entire political discussion moved to LiveJournal. I, as a politician, as a public figure, as a person who does investigations, I was born in LiveJournal, grew up in LiveJournal, my youth was spent in Political LiveJournal. If it weren't for LiveJournal, I wouldn't be able to engage in any politics at all.
In 2007, LiveJournal is bought out by the SUP company, co-owned by Russian entrepreneur Alexander Mamut, Fitzpatrick comes to Moscow and discovers that he is an idol of Runet, who is literally carried on his hands.
Brad Fitzpatrick, founder of LiveJournal
“For the first time, they called me to Russia and said - there will be a technical meeting, you will explain how it all works. I flew in and rushed ... Parties, parties, parties ... It's time to fly away, I say that we never discussed anything. And they say, well, you fly in a couple of months - we'll discuss everything. Since then, I have been to Russia, it seems, 11 times.”
The novel of the founder of LiveJournal with Russia ended with his marriage to a Russian.
The programmer has been working at Google for many years, tired of social networks Fitzpatrick at one time refused Zuckerberg's offer to work on Facebook and receive a small stake in exchange.
“When Facebook went public, I calculated how much I could earn on the shares I gave up. It turned out 92 million dollars. So it goes".
In the summer of 2010, fires swept through central Russia, and Moscow was covered in smoke. In a situation where state channels hid the truth, and the Ministry of Emergency Situations could not cope with the elements, people began to unite to help each other.
Grigory Asmolov, then an employee of the Berkman Center at Harvard, suggested using the Ushahidi platform, created by Kenyan volunteers, to monitor the elections.
Grigory Asmolov, Research Fellow, King's College London
“I wrote a LiveJournal post about the idea of a help card on July 31, 2010. I saw that people react with quite a lot of enthusiasm and many people liked this idea, and the main advantage of this platform was that it took us a little more than a day to create it.”
Art historian Anna Barne suggested in her LiveJournal to collect help for fire victims. A week later, her one-room apartment turned into a warehouse for food and fire fighting equipment.
Anna Barne, volunteer
The flow kept coming and coming. I had already stopped closing the door and it was no longer possible to go to wash my hair, I just sat like this and said that people, here is the money in this envelope, there is pasta here, canned food here, potatoes here. I got fire hoses, which I saw for the first time in my life. There are half-nuts, I didn’t know what it was then, in the kitchen there was a motor pump with an intake sleeve. We somehow tried to coordinate through this LiveJournal, that is, it really was such a real organization “Society from Below”.
After the news about the next fire victims, Anna in her hearts published an open letter to Shoigu, in which she wrote that she had lost faith in the state, but believed in human kindness. The letter went viral, and Anna's life changed dramatically. On the course of volunteer firefighters, she met her future husband, left art history and devoted herself entirely to putting out forest fires.
“This book is the history of aviation forest protection, I managed to make it when I worked there for 4 years. And if they tell me that there are no real men in Russia, I don’t believe it at all, because there are and I personally know at least a couple of hundred.
The founders of the "Help Map" project received the Runet award in 2010. It was the first successful crowdsourcing project in Russia. The idea of crowdsourcing, the mobilization of Internet users to solve certain problems, was picked up by Navalny with the Rosyama, Roszhkh and Rospil projects.
Alexei Navalny, opposition leader
“For me personally, the moment of the power of the Internet happened when I was doing the ROSPIL project. When I started collecting money through the Internet. Yandex Wallet - it was an absolute breakthrough that the Internet gave us, people from the Internet control - audit, other people from the Internet see that, well, it's ours that is being checked, which means they can send money. It was very cool. The whole anti-corruption fund and everything we do, it was thanks to what the Internet gave us.”
Grigory Asmolov, Research Fellow, King's College London
“It was then that people started talking about the fact that, to some extent, the Russian network society could work more efficiently than the state. After that, questions arose, why do we pay taxes, and why, in fact, do we somehow cooperate with the state, if we can solve all the problems ourselves. Of course, this was probably a dangerous signal from the point of view of the Russian authorities.”
In the XNUMXs, the pro-Kremlin youth movement Nashi specialized in street actions in support of the authorities. The movement was supervised by Vladislav Surkov, headed by Vasily Yakimenko, the actions were held with varying success. The press secretary of the movement was Kristina Potupchik, it was she who was instructed by the Presidential Administration to restore order in LiveJournal.
Christina Potupchik, Internet activist
Gradually, the understanding came that the nets needed not only street, but also network, as if online. This work was carried out, then the tops of LiveJournal appeared, the blogger Tekhnomad appeared, who promoted posts and brought them to the top of LiveJournal. We used this manipulation, it was not very expensive, few people knew about it, and then other youth movements also took advantage of this mechanism and began to bring to the top absolutely every post of theirs that the Americans they piss in your elevators and all that. And gradually this site depreciated.
Alexei Navalny, opposition leader
“At some point, they simply gave instructions to all their young guards to start Live Journals, that is, they also had to be brought to the TOP. That is, they have a grid of okhlomons all over the country, and each of these okhlomons was ordered to start a LiveJournal and write posts and write comments. That is, everything turned into thrash.”
- “Before that, no one in LJ did this, yes, that is, no one used the technology to raise content to the top”?
Christina Potupchik, Internet activist
“All oppositional bloggers came out on their own, Navalny was always in the top, but here’s how to defeat it… Well, yes, cheating, nothing like that. Everyone conveys their information in the ways that are possible.
Navalny did not need this, because he had such an "explosive" ...
“Of course, if I wrote that the government is bad, then you know what, I would already be in prison.”
In the spring of 2011, a wave of protests swept through the Arab countries, the uprising in Tunisia and Egypt was called Facebook and Twitter revolutions in the press. In the same year, at the congress of United Russia, the tandem reshuffled, striking many with its cynicism.
Dmitry Medvedev:
“I think it would be right for the congress to support the candidacy of party chairman Vladimir Putin for the post of president of the country. And finally, the main thing is that the choice is always yours. For all the people of Russia."
The company "United Russia - a party of crooks and thieves" has unfolded on the network. Activists signed up as observers at the parliamentary elections and witnessed large-scale fraud. Filming violations immediately laid out on the Internet.
- "Look, they took away the urns and they are doing something with them in the closet."
“They do everything right here.”
"Listen, I'll call the police now."
- "Call."
- "Calmly".
“You have a belly bag under your jacket, in which ballots with ticked boxes for United Russia are enclosed. Yes, I'm nervous, because if they unbutton their jackets, you'll see everything."
- “Nikolai Alekseevich, I send you greetings, huge. Pay attention, the chairman of the commission fills out the ballots.”
"I'm not filling in anything."
- "You just hid to yourself."
- "Go, go."
“I witnessed a criminal offense, not just a violation.”
- "Go to your place."
“Please stop. Now the stuffing was carried out on the site. Please stop, these people were throwing in.”
The day after the elections, thousands of indignant Muscovites came to Chistye Prudy. The police officers detained more than 300 people. Then the OVD-Info project arose, helping to locate the detainees.
Daniil Beilinson, co-founder of the OVD-Info project
“We met at night near one of the police departments and decided that it would be useful to make such a page. It is more difficult for the police to do some kind of atrocities when the society is aware of where people are.”
Rallies demanding fair elections went on all winter and gathered tens of thousands of people, uniting civil activists with political ones. Olga Romanova was offered to become the accountant of the protest, she collected money through Yandex Wallet and kept strict records.
Olga Romanova, founder of the "Seated Rus'" movement
Facebook played a key role in the protests, it is such a rallying point, I still have all these groups now, “Millions of Citizens for Fair Elections”, “League of Voters”, “Observers”. I am not moving away from there, I see no one is moving away from there, but such silent groups are tombstones, here they are in bookmarks and let them stand. There will be a way and all the time you think, God, how naive we were, unusually.
On May 6, on the eve of Putin's inauguration, another mass demonstration ended in a clash with the police. About 400 people were detained. The show trial soon began. More than 30 people became defendants in the Bolotnaya case, many received real terms. Among them is Aleksey Polikhovich, who served three years in prison for grabbing a policeman by the hand. Now works in OVD-Info.
Alexey Polikhovich, OVD-Info editor
“I was called for an interview, then the guys told me, well, we thought it would be cool to take a dude to work with us, about whom we wrote a lot, news” ...
The publication now employs almost 30 people, a separate topic that Polikhovich leads is torture, recently there have been more and more of them.
“Somehow I opened the door to this world of torture and now I probably live in it now. There is such a sketch of the heroine of the "Game of Thrones" Melisandre, the red priestess, comes to the party when everyone gives gifts for a pregnant child and look at everyone with very scary eyes. Sometimes I feel like Melisandre, who says that winter is coming and you are all fucked up, and we are all fucked up, yes.
The reaction to the protests was not long in coming, immediately after the inauguration of the completely controlled parliament began to pass prohibitive laws at such a speed that he was nicknamed the “mad printer” on the Internet. The bans also affected the Runet, for the first time during the years of Putin's rule.
Anton Nosik, Runet evangelist
“According to the results of the December 2011 elections, a certain kind of Duma emerged. According to the results of the protests that took place in Moscow after these elections, this Duma received approximately the powers of the Chinese Hongweibing (Red Guard). That is, they were allowed to smash. This does not mean that the authorities are behind every bright outburst of deputy Zheleznyak or Mizulina. It's just a horde of thugs who compete to see who can smash, trample and burn the most. And the authorities, as they did in China, allow them to behave this way.”
Konstantin Malofeev is an Orthodox oligarch, the owner of the Tsargrad Canal and a fighter for public morality. Monarchist by conviction.
Konstantin Malofeev, entrepreneur, founder of the Safe Internet League
“We believe that Putin was sent to us by God. Therefore, we must do everything in our power to ensure that President Putin remains in power as long as possible. And if this requires changing the constitution, then this need is long overdue.”
Malofeev and the Safe Internet League he created became the initiator of the first prohibitive law in Runet. The filtering law obliges to block sites with malicious information, pedophilia, drug propaganda and suicide.
“The first and foremost thing for the league was to prepare a bill to protect children from negative content. Elena Borisovna Mizulina helped us a lot. She is certainly one of the best legislators, maybe we have five people capable of writing the law among our legislators.
“Does she understand the Internet?”
“On the Internet, we understand, so, in fact, we met.”
Elena Mizulina, member of the Federation Council, State Duma deputy
“Prohibition, as a rule of law from which the law is constructed, and the word must be very clear, which prohibits something. This is the greatest human freedom. And they always say to you, “here, the deputies only forbid it.” This is a false, false, completely wrong notion. This ban is exactly where a person is free. Because he says “this is impossible, and everything else is as you wish.” What is a right? Yes, this is the biggest lack of freedom. I can tell you that the more rights we have, the less free we are.”
Runet leaders, including Yandex, LiveJournal and Vkontakte, opposed the Internet filtering law, seeing it as a censorship tool. Russian Wikipedia staged a one-day strike. The fears were not in vain.
Artyom Kozlyuk, head of the Roskomsvoboda project
“Actually, the first law on blacklisting sites introduced the first three categories. Every half a year, a year, a new law is adopted that expands the category of prohibited information, at the moment there are already more than ten of them. And more than ten departments that have the right to make decisions.”
Konstantin Malofeev, entrepreneur, founder of the Safe Internet League
“Well, the law has been adopted, it has been in force for 8 years already. And please, the Internet has become much cleaner. Now there is certainly no such threat to morality. And the Safe Internet League was created just to fight immorality.”
The West included Malofeev in sanctions lists for financing separatists in eastern Ukraine. Another fighter for morality online, MP Andrei Lugovoi, also has problems with international justice. He is wanted by Interpol for the murder of Alexander Litvinenko (a former FSB officer who died in London in 2006 as a result of poisoning). The so-called Lugovoi law, adopted in 2013, allows Roskomnadzor to block websites containing malicious information immediately and without a court order.
Andrey Lugovoy, Deputy of the State Duma of the Russian Federation
“We should not encourage the dissemination of base human feelings on the Internet, like this openly. And base feelings and everything connected with some kind of crimes. And with calls for anything, from drug addiction to some political stories.”
According to Lugovoy's law, Navalny's blog in LiveJournal was blocked, as well as the opposition websites grani.ru and kasparov.ru. Since then, the State Duma has adopted more than 20 laws restricting the Internet. Last year, MP Lugovoi co-authored the controversial sovereign Internet law, along with senators Lyudmila Bokova and Andrey Klishes. Many perceived the law as a tool to disconnect the Runet from the global network.
Andrey Klishas, member of the Federation Council of the Russian Federation
“It is so pointless and absurd, well, from the point of view of our approaches, that such an option does not even immediately come to mind, to be honest, right? Well, in principle, you can also in your apartment, shut down, turn off the water, gas, electricity and try to live in this apartment, technically you have such an opportunity.
We lived all these decades and no one thought if there was a problem in the fact that the root DNS servers are located in the United States of America and the whole world did not think about it.
DNS root servers are the servers that provide the DNS root zone to the Internet. Regulated by agreement with the ICAAN Corporation, headquartered in Los Angeles.
“I'll tell you, despite the fact that the United Nations includes more than 100 states, there are not so many sovereign states left in the world. For us, this is first of all, for me and my committee, this is a matter primarily related to the protection of the sovereignty of the country.”
Konstantin Malofeev, entrepreneur, founder of the Safe Internet League
“We are not isolationists at all, these are Americans isolationists. Because they wanted them from America to rule the world in isolation.”
They don’t really command anything, they just register the root ones there ...
“Oh, that’s what command is. This is how it happens, no country that claims to be sovereign, that claims to educate the next generations in its values, will never agree to Americans dictating whose root service it is, as you are right speak. But this is just a technique, and most importantly, through Facebook and Google, which are giant corporations, in size much larger than the GDP of many countries, artificially pumped up by the Federal Reserve, no one will allow them to dictate to us how to raise their children. Therefore, of course, a sovereign runet is good, it should be created, I believe that Facebook and Google should definitely be disabled.”
But you interpret the law a little differently. Putin said that this would be some kind of preventive measure, just in case the Americans want ...
“And I’ll tell you right away about what we will come to.”
Malofeev created cyber teams of volunteers at the Safe Internet League, which detect malicious content. Now the cyber-teams are led by activists from Tver. Conduct cybersecurity courses for young people. Threatening links are sent to a closed Vkontakte group, which is monitored by representatives of Roskomnadzor.
Grigory Pashchenko, head of the "Cyberdruzhina" movement
"We are patriots, we are for patriotism, we love our country."
- "What do you mean by this concept in the context of your activities"?
“In the context, this is the education of our true values. We were forced into these same-sex marriages, same-sex love. We are breaking the institution of the family. We are stopping it."
Sergey Bolshakov, coordinator of the "Cyberdruzhina" movement
“Well, these are the well-known Blue Whales. It was just the same Navalny, he collects people through social networks. Then there was an appeal to us, the boy is sitting at home, he doesn’t go out, he says, I’ll earn a million on the Internet, etc., he can’t throw garbage out of the house, just go for a walk with friends, there was a rally in Navalny’s Tver, he immediately quickly went to him. These were the cases."
- "And what does it mean"?
“Well, this means that the target audience, which Navalny influenced, for his political or other purposes.”
- "Could you lift the boy off the couch and bring him outside"?
Kremlin bots, cyber squads and prohibitive laws, the attack on the Russian Internet was not limited. In 2013, Novaya Gazeta journalists discovered a company in St. Petersburg whose employees are engaged in the creation of pro-Kremlin content for money. The official name of the company was "Internet Research Agency", and the world knows its other name "Troll Factory".
- “And also in these parties, when everyone is tipsy, we have cartoons going on:
- Hi.
- Hi.
- You are good.
- And I have a girlfriend.
She's smarter, but scarier.
And here is Lyoshka with an eye stained with greenery.
- "Lyoshka here is a little like Yeltsin in some way."
- "Lyoshka, in principle, looks like a young Yeltsin."
Vitaly Bespalov is a journalist from Tyumen who arrived 5 years ago to conquer the northern capital. In search of a job, Vitaliy came across an ad that offered 2 times more money for the work of an editor than the market average. So he ended up inside the "Troll Factory", which was then located on Savushkina Street.
Vitaly Bespalov, journalist, former employee of the Internet Research Agency
“The first floor is websites, the second floor is SMM and pictures, there were actually blogs and comments, where, in fact, the trolls who glorified this building.”
Bespalov was sent to the "Ukraine" department, where he worked on several fake sites posing as Ukrainian. The most famous of them is nahnews, the Kharkiv news agency. After the exposure, he no longer hides his origin.
“A day you need to find 20 news of any kind about Ukraine, rewrite, publish. You can’t write news where Russia is mentioned in the context of the conflict, you can’t write a terrorist, a separatist, nothing, only militias. Nothing bad, funny, nothing at all about Putin. Just like a dead man, either good or nothing. That is, it was always clearly spoken. ”
Another whistleblower of the Troll Factory, Svetlana Savchuk, had a more creative name. She, along with other employees, led a fortuneteller's blog named Contadora on LiveJournal.
Svetlana Savchuk, civil activist, former employee of the Internet Research Agency
“The image of such a character, beloved by Russians, was created, this is a fortuneteller, a psychic, a woman there who sees prophetic dreams, fortune-telling, healing, and so on and so forth. Everything we love. There were very few political posts in terms of number. I was saved by the fact that my main content of the work was to write all sorts of nonsense about the magical properties of stones and plants. The more expensive the troll account, the more difficult it is to see propaganda there.”
Vitaly Bespalov, journalist, former employee of the Internet Research Agency
“The bulk are very young people, 21-22, 30 was the ceiling. A lot of people have a journalistic education, almost all of them are newcomers, that is, such typical representatives who simply could not find a job in their specialty. Basically, these people came, did all this for 8,5 hours, left - that’s all, somehow they didn’t care anymore, didn’t care, they seemed to have no reflection on this matter.
Svetlana Savchuk, civil activist, former employee of the Internet Research Agency
“Unfortunately, these are the most ordinary guys that we meet every day on the street. Absolutely not ... One girl showed me her puppy, told me about her dad and such a sweet girl. And what comes out of their hands is a horror of course. Why do they do it? They don't understand anything. They don’t understand anything… When Nemtsov was killed, no one at the factory knew practically who Nemtsov was, only one woman from my department, she was older and she was upset, almost to tears. I saw it. And when she came to her senses after this news, she sat down to write about the death of a dog for a dog, and so on and so forth.
Yevgeny Zubarev heads the so-called “media factory”, an unnamed holding of pro-Kremlin publications, the most famous of which is the Federal News Agency, RIA FAN, which does not hide its propaganda focus.
Evgeny Zubarev, General Director of RIA FAN
“In February, I came to Crimea as a reporter to film what was happening there, because it was interesting. And the first thing I encountered was people who told me about the "Korsun" pogrom. More than a thousand people, Crimeans, went to Kyiv to rally for Yanukovych, and they told me in great detail what respectable, democratic-minded Ukrainians did to them on the way back. How they got out of the forests, where they ran away, when they stopped these buses, how they raped, beat, killed people there.
Note. editions. Not a single documented case of murder or rape during the so-called. "Korsun pogrom" was not recorded.
"The history of the creation of the fan is such that it took the media, which would work within the framework of some kind of information defense."
RIA FAN used to be in the same building as the Troll Factory on Savushkina Street, but after the exposure, the trolls and media projects dispersed to different business centers. Zubarev denies any connection with the Troll Factory.
“Look, we were sitting there on the first floor, everything is divided there. We have a separate one there… That is, you know how now in this business center I have no idea what is here, but to show me that there is karting here and, God forbid, someone will be killed. And tomorrow you write, “And Zubarev, the karting Fuhrer, and he has people fighting there, they constantly die there,” well, there must be some kind of logic ”?
Vitaly Bespalov, journalist, former employee of the Internet Research Agency
“Zubarev walked so proud, all the time very important.”
“And he said that he didn’t even know that there were some trolls sitting there.”
“Well, how can I say without mats then? He's lying. Well, how did he not know? Well, he is in the same building, that is, he occupied, I think he was sitting on the second floor, if I am not mistaken, whether it was the 3rd or 4th floor, but in my opinion there was an office on the second floor. I was there once, when I was leaving, I went to see him.”
All publications of the Zubarev media holding are deeply unprofitable. The investor of both the Media Factory and the Troll Factory is businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, known in the press as Putin's cook.
Evgeny Zubarev, General Director of RIA FAN
“As for the investor, yes, for investors, I will not comment. I told you, we are in a situation of a real information war. For example, the Federal News Agency was recently included in the sanctions list by the Ministry of Justice.”
- “For the connection with Prigogine? With Concord?
“No, for meddling in elections.”
In 2018, RIA FAN, Evgeny Prigozhin and 12 employees of the Internet Research Agency were included in the sanctions list by the US Department of Justice.
“Expectation of some kind of mitigation, any other twists and turns, no, I’m just explaining it again. We are at the forefront of this information war. And we don't have any friends, sorry.
“Mr. Prigozhin is not only engaged in restaurants, he has many farms that have concluded agreements with the Ministry of Defense and receive many government orders and spend millions of dollars on this “Troll Factory” so that they make these posts. Why does a restaurateur need this?
“Ask him, the Russian state has nothing to do with this.”
“You know him yourself.”
“So what? I know a lot of people, both in St. Petersburg and in Moscow. You ask".
“Is this the same building? Troll factory?
- "Yes, sure".
After his dismissal, Bespalov spoke about his work at the Troll Factory to the American NBC channel. On the Russian channel, they laughed at his tattoos without refuting a single fact.
- "It is important to understand that a big fan of Ksenia Sobchak, T-shirts, and he also has a tattoo on his arm."
"Helsinki".
Now Bespalov makes one of the most visited LGBT sites in RuNet "Guys +" and maintains his blog on YouTube.
Lyudmila Savchuk won a lawsuit against the Internet Research Agency, thus confirming its existence. Travels around the world with lectures about the "Troll Factory" and is treated for depression.
“I was leaving the Troll Factory and I met the same theses from the lips of my acquaintances, real people who believed that these were their own thoughts. They said the same thing that was written in the manuals. I thought there was a way to stop it. It’s naive, yes, in fact, maybe I’m broken now as an activist, because I very much believed that something could be done about it. ”
Ilya Varlamov, blogger
“No matter how miserable, vile, disgusting it was, but at some point they managed to change the picture and for any of your “I am an oppositionist there”, ten people resorted to you, who convinced that you were shit, and not an oppositionist, a traitor , 5th column and in general you went to the ass there, right?
- "So they managed to create a feeling of numerical superiority"?
“This is not a feeling, it affects people, it’s not just like that, it would be rather frivolous and not far-sighted to assume that everyone understands where the troll is, where the troll is not. Well, this is how to assume that, well, whoever watches TV, everyone understands that this is a lie. And for a moment, the TV was able to convince people to go to war with the brotherly people and kill their relatives there. I also worked on the Internet, and collected my fruits, and at some point the Internet became just so stuffy.
Alexei Navalny, opposition leader
“At some point they made such a bot machine and I hung up a post and in the first 3 seconds I had 1000 comments, well, with some kind of pornography, there is a naked woman or just meaningless text, I attracted a programmer who wrote a robot and who started banning these comments. Then they started to hang a picture, and by the number of pixels, the robot measured that it was a picture and banned those who hang this picture. They changed the pictures and the number of pixels in the pictures. People stopped writing to me, because what's the point of writing if your comment is there on the 29th page. I included as friends everyone who wrote some comments to me over the past few years and closed commenting from everyone else, well, that is, I lost.
- What was the strategy?
“Buying, spoiling the sites, that is, spoiling the discussion itself, reducing the level of discussion, intimidating and, from a technical point of view, being stronger than us.”
After the sudden blocking of his LiveJournal account, Navalny left for the stand-alone platform. Today LiveJournal is more dead than alive.
Artemy Lebedev, designer of all Rus'
“Now LJ is the Aral Sea, that is, the embankment is standing, the life buoy is hanging, anchors are drawn on the bars, but there is no water, that is, all the water is gone. It’s the same with LiveJournal, everything works, there is a logo, you can write a post, but there are no readers.”
Kristina Potupchik's business is still going uphill. The girl opened her own Internet marketing agency, among whose clients is the Presidential Administration, instead of LJ now Telegram. Potupchik has over 40 channels, many of which are political. Putin recently presented her with the Order of Merit for the Fatherland. This spring, Potupchik's book about channel promotion in Telegram was published.
- "Do you have any other successful projects in the network"?
Christina Potupchik, Internet activist
- “Well, not many can be talked about, but it’s probably better not to talk about any at all, why, this is all an inner kitchen, yes, why am I going to expose magic and talk about tricks”?
“Well, yes, I have been working in this field for 12 years.”
- "We use the Internet and do not really understand how many of your tricks are there."
"I hope you don't understand."
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