LiveJournal moved to Russia

[math_mommy]

Just a warning for members: LiveJournal was bought by Russian businessman a while ago, and now LJ servers are moved into Russia. Last couple of years in Russian speaking part of LJ there was already a flood of fake news about great and benevolent Russian president, in particular, a lot of lies about Russian agression in neighborhood countries.

Comments

[ertla]

The server doesn't have to be in any particular country for fake news to be a thing. Lots of groups seem to happily send fake news to other people's servers.

But censorship in favour of the opinions of the owners. Of course.

I would advise not using social media sites as one's primary source of news, and working hard to develop a strong "bullshit detector". There's plenty of rubbish out there, and while it helps to distinguish reputable news sites from random unknowns, it's not sufficient. Plenty of once reputable news media are publishing sponsored content - not identified as such - i.e articles written by or on behalf of advertisers, masquerading as coming from the news media's reporters or editors.

On the good side, folks on the Asperger's spectrum often have an advantage in developing BS detectors, compared to folks far from the spectrum. This may simply be because most of the lies/advertisements are targetted at NTs, but it does seem that I see straight through things that appear to take in my colleagues.

[math_mommy]

You are right. A lot of the fake news are presented in very emotional way. In addition if you ask a person distributing them about evidence then you got an angry and arrogant reply. It is illogical.

[mplsindygirl]

I'm not happy to have this confirmed, but also not surprised by it.

[math_mommy]

Did you know about it already?

[ertla]

This is actually fairly old news. The most recent news account I could find was from 2012. http://www.dailydot.com/news/livejournal-shut-down-us-office/

At that time Live Journal was owned by SUP Media, a Russian companty which had bought LiveJournal from Six Apart in 2007.

I have not so far found anything saying LiveJournal had been sold again.

FWIW, dreamwidth (www.dreamwidth.org) uses a fork of the same software, and AFAIK is not owned by Russians. (It was originally founded by LiveJournal employee(s), who left LiveJournal to do this.)

[math_mommy]

Some part of the news is old, about LJ being owned by a Russian.
But the move to Russian servers happened a few days ago.
At the same time a number of blogs which are opposed to Russian government became unreachable for a day or two. They are back on line now, but nobody knows what will happen next.

Some people started to relocate to dreamwidth.org. I'm thinking about it as well.

[khandreia]

I don't suppose you have a credible source for this, do you? Because this is the first I've heard of this. Previous reports I'd seen before now were that it had been bought back from Russian ownership by a US-based group (sometime in the past few years or so). Has it changed hands again?

[math_mommy]

If you are technically inclined you can figure out the servers' location yourself. It is not updated in Wiki at this time. You need to do a bit of investigation to find out to whom LJ belongs

[xxgross]

I still get San Francisco-based Livejournal viewing my LJ when I post and check my tracker. A bot or something.

[math_mommy]

?
I checked it from California. How you did it?