Following a year of increasing Internet repression in Belarus, Reporters without Borders has added the country to its 2012 “Enemies of the Internet” list. Read More »

Fake profiles have been cropping up in Belarusian Facebook circles.  Is this just marketing gone social, or something more sinister? Read More »

We all remember the Facebook map of the world, where the regions with an active Facebook presence are highlighted. The map states the obvious: the light represents the areas with domination of English, Portuguese, French, Spanish-even Polish languages. Read More »

A new video from Belarus depicting President Alexander Lukashenko as an annoying bee harassing a journalist has reached more than 60,000 views since it was posted 29 February, making it the first political video in the country to go viral. Read More »

Citizen journalism is a great way of getting facts and local news directly from the source–from the community itself. This information can always be processed and published later by the professional journalists. However in Belarus, citizen journalism has yet to take off. Read More »

Users of BY-net (a short name for the Belarusian segment of the Internet) have identified a KGB functionary who had been recruiting activists who participated in the silent demonstrations. A man in the photo leaked to Belarusian social networks has been identified rather quickly as Raman Savuchin. Charter97.org reports that this officer was working along with Dzmitry Kalamijec, an officer who became famous in the BY-net after his photos surfaced showing him recruiting Maks Carniauski, one of the prominent activists from the silent demonstrations . Read More »

The last week a wave of publications about increasing Internet control in Belarus has spread across the Western Internet. It has come back to the Belarusian segment in translations suggesting that “the citizens of the small country will no longer be able to use the foreign websites as they will be fined for that” and the Internet is close to being completely closed off.

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In Belarus there is something jokingly Belarus called the “Albanian Virus”. This is a virus that asks the user to delete all his sensitive content and spam his friends manually. This joke became been popular in Belarus in the time of virus pandemics during the ’90s. Read More »

A story started making its way around the Belarusian Internet several days ago when the state ISP Beltelecom sent its subscribers a request to change the DNS servers manually in order to “comply with the legislature on controlling Internet access”. Read More »

Social media-spawned protests have failed to materialize as expected despite recent attempts by Belarusian activists. Read More »

Belarusian writer, researcher and social commentator Evgeny Morozov is an expert on how technology affects social and political arenas. Earlier this year he published a book called The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom where he looks critically at the ideas and idealism of cyber-utopianism  and how the Internet may do as much harm for democracy as it does good for people in authoritarian states.

In 2009, Morozov gave a talk called The Internet in Society: Empowering or Censoring Citizens where he spoke about these issues.  RSA Animate put the talk to images for this great video.

The past week in Belarus has been marked by two events: the regular meeting of applause on Wednesday, July 20, and the July 21 demonstration by motorists protesting the rise in petrol prices. Read More »

Since the Wednesday July 6th demonstration of applause in Belarus, a phenomenon that is being increasingly covered by the international media, the organizers of the Revolution through the Social Networks announced in communities on VKontakte and Facebook that they are changing strategy. Read More »

The “Wednesday revolutions” organized via social networks and conducted in Minsk and other regional towns are making the Belarusian authorities nervous. Read More »