In this video, Beg Zuhorov, the Tajik communications official who has been doing the talking on why his government ordered the 2-day closure of Facebook, RFE/RL and other sites controversial for some Tajiks, was the subject of a trolling by some Russians.
They called him up pretending to be "Sergei Brin, translator for Mark Zuckerberg, who is sitting here."
Right!
Among the intersting phrases that Beg hems and haws in somewhat struggling Russian (a second language for bureaucracy in Tajikistan which some say is dying out) is that "People order each other on Facebook," i.e. that make commercial orders.
What he means by that isn't prostitution (it would be an awfully difficult and expensive way to organize prostitution in Tajikistan, given the low Internet penetration and the easier methods of normal waving to cars on the street or SMS texts on dumb phones.)
What he means is jintsa, or ordering up favourable things to be said about yourself in mainstream media or social media as a kind of branding exercise or advertisement.
This is done all the time in Russia, and probably entire government offices are also busy keeping fresh the fake profiles of officials like the Uzbek foreign minister, which is said to be a fan page by an over-eager admirer -- a factoid indignantly explained to us by "experts" like Sarah Kendzior" -- but is probably actually him anyway (like where does he get those CIS meeting photos from angles that kremlin.ru *didn't* use?)
Given how some Russians have taken to Facebook to strut their stuff, maybe we need a fund to pay them to take some of the eyesores down.
In any event, I'm still puzzled WHAT bothers Beg on Facebook. There are only about 40,000 Tajiks on Facebook and probably most of them are no-shows.
The top Facebook pages in Tajikistan according to Social Bakers, a company that analyzes FB data are:
The US Embassy in Dushanbe (that's because a lot of young people want to get on educational exchange programs and get out of Tajikistan
Tcell -- a mobile provider
Ya Zhurnalist -- a blog in Russian --- and yeah, um, Russian is dying out, sure.
Asia-Plus, the leading independent news service -- really among the best in the region
Zavedeniya Tajikistan -- a Russian-language site (um, dying out, yeah), with restaurants and such.
Ya Zhurnalist has 4,000 plus fans. It's a site about new media, and seems fairly anodyne. Also has a lot of news of those Western-sponsored media training programs.
I'm trying to really understand what was "extremist" on Facebook. Probably just a news story on Asia Plus the authorities didn't like. Or maybe some overactive post-Soviet royalty like the president's son didn't like the way he was portrayed on Facebook? Who are the 100-200 people calling Beg every day to complain about "extremism"?
