From: Timothy Blauvelt <blauvelt@rambler.ru>
Subject: Report from Tbilisi On Russian media blocking
Date: Tue, 16 Sep 2008
On Russian media blocking in Georgia
As most people know, when the conflict started in August the Georgian government requested that cable companies remove Russian TV stations and that internet providers block all Russian internet sites. It took about three or four days for most people to figure out what internet proxies are and how to use them to easily get around the block. One of my friends quipped that the 5% of Georgian internet users who were too stupid to figure out how to use a proxy were probably the ones who were dumb enough to believe the propaganda in the Russian media, so perhaps the blocking had some effective after all. But generally speaking people in Tbilisi have been easily able to get news from Russian sources. The very balanced commentary on Ekho Moskvy has been especially popular (RTVI, which broadcasts Ekho.Moskvy interviews, was blocked for a briefly in August, but came back on soon).
But while they’re easy to use for news sites, proxies tend to be a bit dodgy, so people were reluctant to use them with sites involving passwords. So although many people in Georgian have e-mail accounts on Russian services (Rambler, Yandex, Mail.ru), it was harder to access these, so many people switched to other accounts. It also put a hamper on Georgians’ national obsession of the last half year or so with the Russian site Odnoklassniki.ru. Even though a lot of English speaking Georgians use Facebook, Odnoklassniki seems to be by far and away the favorite social site here. Some people even speculate that it must have been a boon to Russian intelligence, since all sorts of Georgian government officials and public figures have their own pages and put lots of information there.
There were some points where there really was a critical lack of information especially the night of August 11 when the Georgian army pulled back from Gori and it seemed that a Russian assault on Tbilisi was imminent. Everybody thought the Russians had reached Mtskheta, about 20 minutes from the city center. The telephone networks were jamming up (although calls would still go through if you dialed multiple times), and the TV stations were only playing old movies. It seems there was simply a lack of information about what was going on more generally, and that this wasn’t because of the block on Russian TV and websites. The scuttlebutt around town is that the British and German embassies were so panicked that night that they destroyed their communications equipment one of the few times that this has been done in their respective diplomatic histories. As far as I know, most of the foreign embassies didn’t figure out what was going on until an OSCE observer team drove up from Tbilisi to Tskhinvali the next morning and saw that the Russians at that point hadn’t advanced beyond Gori.
In any case, last week the government removed the block on Russian websites on Tuesday, but then on Wednesday they were all blocked again. After that it was announced that news sites would remain blocked, but others would be accessible. It seems it took the providers some time to figure out how to block some but not all. The blocking strategy seems to be a bit haphazard. All the main news sites are blocked, but some more pro-Georgian sites (like Ekho Moskvy and the excellent Newsgeorgia.ru) are blocked, while for a while Krasnaya Zvezda was still accessible. Odnoklassniki and non-political sites are not blocked. Apparently it’s a work in progress. But it still doesn’t really seem to make any sense at all, since anybody can just use a proxy.
Timothy Blauvelt
Tbilisi, Georgia.