Well damn.

[elisi]

The attack on LJ has reached the mainstream media!

Money quote:

"This kind of attack is something totally new," says Marina Litvinovich, a former government spin doctor who went on to create Russia's main aggregator of blog posts, BestToday.ru. "It is an attempt to uproot not one user but the entire LiveJournal community, which appears to have become too influential, too strong in setting the political agenda of the day."

Indeed, with around 5 million Russian accounts read by some 30 million people per month, LiveJournal has emerged as the country's last truly free and public space for political debate, a chaotic kind of intellectual clearinghouse and the source of not only gossip, conspiracy theories and pro-government propaganda, but also countless revelations of corruption and official incompetence. In terms of the sheer variety of opinions expressed and defended on LiveJournal, it has been leagues ahead of Russia's other media.

Makes me kinda proud. And worried.

Comments

[yourlibrarian]

Makes me kinda proud. And worried

Ha, yes. I find it rather remarkable that they don't mention LJ as a site used by anyone except Russians. Either they think this goes without saying or they think no one remembers that anymore. I'd be curious to know how small a fraction the non-Russian users are at this point.

[ruuger]

There are still almost twice as many users from US than from Russia (though the stats don't take activity into count, and I would guess that the percentage of abandoned/non-active accounts is higher on the non-Russian side of LJ), but I guess LJ has dropped in popularity so much compared to the other social network platforms in the English speaking world that it's now basically irrelevant outside Russia.

[yourlibrarian]

Yeah, I should have been more clear because I was thinking of current activity rather than accounts -- the old "last month" versus "last 24 hours" thing.

I think it would actually benefit the Russian language users to move to a larger international platform like Facebook. Given the language barrier I don't know as the political conversation would gain any more exposure, but attacks on it certainly would. I think Twitter would be the best long-term platform because one could rope together conversations and topics through hashtags while the actual content could reside in multiple locations and platforms making it very difficult to take down everything. However Twitter is already so unstable just from growth that it's not much of an option for now.

[elisi]

*nods* It's just weird, because LJ has always been a fannish place in my head. Having it be this political platform is odd, and makes me go 'But what about the porn???'

[elisi]

I find it rather remarkable that they don't mention LJ as a site used by anyone except Russians.
Lack of research?

[yourlibrarian]

Ha ha, or generational gap. Not that any lack of prep work by a reporter surprises me much but I still recall the outrage that Martin Landau expressed to an MTV reporter who was completely unaware, while covering the release of the first Mission Impossible film, that it had ever been a TV series (and thus wondered who he was and what he was doing there).

[elisi]

LOL! Oh dear, oh dear...