Digital Refugee

I haven't really been keeping up with the Denial of Service attacks on Twitter and Facebook, except to note that Twitter fared worse in the event. But apparently it was a politically motivated attack by Russia to silence one blogger. One blogger! From Andrew Sullivan:

The Thursday outage on Twitter and Facebook that left millions without access was the result of a cyber-attack against a political blogger from the Republic of Georgia. The blogger, who goes by the name "CYXYMU," accuses the Russian government of trying to silence him. FP's Evgeny Morozov has been tracking CYXYMU's campaign of dissent for many months now, dubbing him the first "digital refugee."

It's a smart strateg by Russia. These platforms are probably perfectly happy to remove individual troublemakers, which in turn threatens the whole ideal of free speech on the internet. It also suggests that these services have become something much more than trivial social networking.