
Bloggers Leave LiveJournal as Servers Move to Russia - unicornporn
http://www.metafilter.com/164293/LiveJournal-represents-social-media-without-borders
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devoply
Understandable if you are a dissident that's working against Russian
interests. Not understandable otherwise, as everything you post online is
available for anyone to do with as they choose anyhow.

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rospaya
> Not understandable otherwise, as everything you post online is available for
> anyone to do with as they choose anyhow.

Russia is a country that heavily censores the internet and opresses its own
people. That's a good enough reason.

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huhtenberg
It's China that _heavily_ censores (sic) the Internet.

Russia just censors, but it's on par with the US, India and other countries.
They just don't get their fair of TV coverage.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_and_survei...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_and_surveillance_by_country)

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tptacek
In what way does the US censor the Internet at all?

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devoply
In some ways freedom of speech can be used as a tool of surveillance. You say
that people can say anything they want, and then you let them tell you who you
should be watching via your sophisticated surveillance apparatus.

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mcphage
Answering a question about censorship with a response about surveillance is a
pretty big non sequitur.

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devoply
What it boils down to is that we don't censor things, well the reason we don't
censor things is because our government does not feel the need to censor
things to continue to function. That's because we have methods of dealing with
people saying things that we don't want to become common opinion, i.e. we have
very sophisticated propaganda tools to sway public opinion that until now were
working pretty well. So we don't have to censor. Regimes where they don't have
those type of tools have to censor, otherwise they lose power and legitimacy
and things become chaotic. You can't control people.

To a Western secularist who basically has a covenant with the State called the
Constitution, so it's a religious sort of deal. When the reason is not
religious as to why states do this, they don't do it because they are bad or
evil people. They do it because they feel that they have no choice and because
that's how things in their country with their people.

For the Western States which have destabilized and destroyed many States in
the Middle East using this sort of rhetoric, of saving them from a government
oppressing its people, they don't have a leg to stand upon. They are not good
because they are saving people from an evil dictator that does not follow
their covenant. They are in fact at times evil and sociopathic in destroying
and destabilizing those states that can not run properly without a dictator.

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lykron
If anyone is looking to jump ship, DreamWidth is a fork of LiveJournal.

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unicornporn
Edited the title to better describe what the post was about. I hope that's OK.

~~~
carbocation
I don't know what you had edited it to, but the current title is both true to
the title on MeFi and doesn't really tell the gist of the story, which is
"LiveJournal servers now located in Russia; purge of dissident accounts
alleged" or something like that.

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r721
Yeah, it was changed back to original title by mods, it seems.

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mankash666
If the Russian state wants to mess with your blog, they will regardless of the
geography it's hosted in. Case in point - the recent DNC email hacks.

This post assumes livejournal is somehow working with the state to facilitate
censorship or surveillance. That seems a little presumptuous.

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mankash666
Disappointed with the down votes. A company is not the same as the country it
operates from

