Since the rise of the Arab Spring, ex-Soviet
countries in the Central Asian region, like Tajikistan and Uzbekistan
have been imposing Internet restrictions. The leaders of those republics
recognize the role that social media had in overthrowing existing
regimes in countries, like Egypt and Libya. Following the trend, the
government of Takijistan has ordered a shutdown of Facebook and two
Russian news sites, which carried an article criticizing of the current
regime. Local Internet providers who requested anonymity said that the
shutdown was ordered by state run communications service. Users who
tried to access the three sites were redirected to the homepages of
their Internet service providers. The Russian news sites that were shut
down were tjknews.com and zvezda.ru. The latter site is based in Russia
and ran an article entitled, "Tajikistan on the eve of a revolution".
The former site tjknews.com, which is also a local site, republished the
article.
The article that started the shutdowns was a critical piece on
the long running President of Tajikistan, Imomali Rakhmon. The President
has ruled Tunisia for two decades. Though the media in Tajikistan has
been allowed to operate without too much restriction, there have been
journalists who have been detained in recent months. Tajikistan has 7.5
million people and 26,000 of those people are on Facebook. Although that
seems like a small percentage of the population, that number is a
result of the Facebooking population doubling, in the past year.
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