Facebook: Medvedev “De-friends” Georgia

Many Facebook users block other users for posting nasty comments on their wall, but few have blocked an entire country. Yet this is what happened yesterday when Russian President Dmitry Medvedev apparently decided he'd had it with angry posts from Georgia.

The onslaught against the Russian president’s Facebook page took place on the February 23 Homeland Defender’s Day, a Russian public holiday that commemorates military service. To mark the day, Georgians (and not only) in a loosely coordinated campaign bombarded Medvedev’s page with requests to withdraw Russian troops from separatist Abkhazia and South Ossetia, territories kept under heavy Russian military guard since the 2008 Russia-Georgia war.

The steady flow of comments ran the gamut from demands, to requests (for an IDP's return to Abkhazia, for instance) to coarse statements. “It was essentially an occupy-Medvedev’s-Facebook-page campaign to demand the de-occupation of Georgia,” one user commented to EurasiaNet.org.  

At first, the comments kept disappearing almost instantly, and instead greetings from well-wishers started to pop up. “I wish you good health, Dmitry Anatoliyevich,” one kind user wrote, but her wishes got drowned in an avalanche of comments from Georgia.

Apparently unable to keep up with the stream, the Kremlin's Facebook men simply disabled the page for users from Georgia.

“They blocked users with Georgian IPs for a little bit,” said Giorgi Jakhaia, a Georgian blogger displaced from Abkhazia, and one of the organizers of the campaign. After briefly reopening, "the page got blocked again" when a fresh barrage of comments began, said Jakhaia, known by his nom de blog, Cyxymu.

One Ukraine-based Facebook user with Russian military officers in the family told EurasiaNet.org that, after seeing Jakhaia's comment that Georgia-based users had been blocked from Medvedev's Facebook page, she decided to post a demand that "you and Mr. Putin stop the mess you've been doing in Georgia for several years now."

Some Russian news sites and blogs described the campaign as a Georgian flash mob. One pro-Georgian user has proposed taking the campaign to Twitter next.  Will Russia's homeland defenders prove ready?