Ukrainian journalists take regime’s corruption public with YanukovychLeaks

YanukovychLeaks.org is a new website created by Ukrainian journalists to publish documents that were found in Victor Yanukovych’s residence. Many of them document evidence of massive corruption of the regime.

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The Caucasus Network: in blogs, Russian is the common language

This article is part of an extensive RuNet Echo study of the North Caucasus blogosphere. Explore the complete report and personal stories on The Caucasus Network page.

Russian is the lingua franca that bridges the republics of the North Caucasus. None of the many indigenous non-Russian languages dominate any of the blogging platforms in the North Caucasus, even the forums dedicated exclusively to regions’ internal issues operate in Russian. Read More »

Chronicles of Euromaidan: digging into the social media

“One morning, after the dissolution of the student protests on Maidan, we woke up in another country,”  said Pavlo Pedenko, one of the creators of Maidan Chronicles, as he explained the pretext of the idea to build a platform that preserves and gathers all the data from social media related to the Euromaidan movement in Ukraine. Read More »

New Website Collects Reports and Data About Bribes in Hungary

Hungary, like many other countries in the region, has an on-going corruption problem on almost every level of governance. A new project created by investigative website Átlátszó.hu and Transparency International, Fizettem.hu, has taken on the task of collecting reports from citizens about cases of bribery and corruption in the country. Read More »

Czechs spice up a game of geocaching with the flavor of space

Thousands of players participated in a quest to locate ‘seeds from space’ after they were released from a balloon 30 kilometers above the ground on 16 November, Technet.cz reports.

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The Moscow Mayor’s mischievous viral marketing

Throughout the Moscow mayor’s race, Alexey Navalny’s campaign has taken a beating from all sides on questions about financing, nationalism, and even transparency. Read More »

Macedonia turns to SMS to curb pesticide use

Farmers in the Prespa Lake Basin of Resen, Macedonia are reducing the amount of harmful pesticides polluting the region with the help of a new system that incorporates monitoring pests and social media, according to National Geographic’s “News Watch”.

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Teen suicides put Latvia’s Ask.fm under scrutiny

The parents of the Latvian founders of a social media platform involved in a British suicide row are defending their sons, the Daily Mail writes. Latvian entrepreneurs and founders of Ask.fm, Ilja Terebin, 34, and Mark Terebin, 29, have come under fire from relatives of teens who have committed suicide after being cyber-bullied. Read More »

Moscow to track subway riders’ mobile phones

Moscow’s metro system will soon be equipped with devices able to read data off people’s mobile phones.

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U.S. bloggers courted to whitewash Ukraine’s Party of Regions

A proxy group working for Ukraine’s ruling Party of Regions organized a stealth public relations campaign in the States, contacting American conservative bloggers and paying them for favorable posts across social media platforms, according to BuzzFeed. The campaign started around the time of last fall’s parliamentary elections.

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Summer camp gets high tech in Moldova

Over the past spring, the Moldovan new-media NGO MediaPoint has been working with hundreds of youth across the country to get them up-to-speed on the ins and outs of social media, blogging, and web literacy.

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Uzbek entrepreneurs launch new social media site

Three Uzbek entrepreneurs have founded a new picture-sharing social media site called Modera, according to the Sacramento Press.

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The terrifying potential of a post-Navalny Russia

On the eve of being sentenced to a five-year term in a penal colony, Alexey Navalny blogged about puffer fish. The Russian opposition would be remiss to think of itself as a school of small fish being pursued by a big predatory fish (i.e. the Kremlin), he wrote on his blog. The predator was simply putting on an act to conceal its weakness.

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Tragedy ignites online friendship between Romanians and Montenegrins

In one of the most tragic road accidents ever seen in Montenegro, 18 Romanian nationals lost their lives and 29 were injured on June 23, 2013 when a Romanian bus full of tourists ran off the Grlo bridge 30 kilometers away from the Montenegrin capital of Podgorica into a 40-meter-deep ravine of the Morača canyon.

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