Russian Bloggers Are As Powerful As Russian Hackers
August 12, 2008 |
Since both the blogosphere and the traditional media is abuzz today with the news about a cyberattack against Georgian official websites presumably organized by Russia (and I have already claimed that I believe the Russian hackers really did not need any special request to get started with the DDoS attack), I thought I’d mention another aspect of the situation that is remotely related to this one and proves my point again.
A Russian-language blog reports today another story about Russian bloggers manipulating results of a poll on CNN website to demonstrate what exactly people think here about the conflict between Russia and Georgia over South Ossetia.
The story began when CNN decided to carry out a poll where respondents were supposed to answer one simple question: “Do you think Russia’s actions in Georgia are justified?” with two options available: 1) Yes, it’s peacekeeping and 2) No, it’s an invasion.
I believe CNN editors expected to receive opinions from the site’s main target audience (which definitely is not in Russia) but what it received instead were mainly votes from Russia with the first answer getting 92% of votes (or over 329 thousand of people).
How did this happen? Very simple actually. The information about the CNN poll quickly made it to the Russian blogosphere (it is impossible to determine where it all started because of the huge number of posts on the topic) and bloggers started encouraging their readers to go to CNN and vote for the first option. The news was quickly disseminated over an enormous number of the Russian blogs and the results were predictable: 92% supported the official point of view of the Russian government.
The poll is not active any more and no matter how hard I tried I could not find any archive for previous polls on CNN but I hope the screen shot in the beginning of the post is credible enough. I hope no one will suggest here that it was an organized campaign initiated by the governmental authorities in Russia. It just proves once again that Russian people – be it bloggers or hackers – will do exactly what they believe in without any invitation from the government.
Screenshot courtesy of Webplanet.ru.
It was CNN's fault for only leaving two options.
I would have said:
Yes, Russia is taking advantage of the opportunity given to them under the banner of self defense when in the night the US and Israel helped Georgia attack during a military drill.
@Andrey: Very true, social media can be used to promote any idea – good or bad – virally in a very efficient way. But there's one thing you forgot to mention: people will only help you promote this idea if they truly believe in what you want them to promote. Otherwise it will not work. And this is exactly what happened here with Russian bloggers acting this passionately to show the world that they also have something to say about the conflict instead of letting everyone listen to what the media outlets choose to tell them. It may not be useful but it is patriotism and it is something to be proud of when a nation is so willing to act united over a difficult situation.
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