anarchistcommunism:

“Starting on August 9… somewhere around 9:00 am, the internet started to be shut down,” recalled Maksimas Milta, Head of Communication and Development Unit at the Belorusian European Humanities University, the university now exiled and based in Lithuania. Milta was on the ground in Minsk when the first websites were attacked: an independent platform for tracking voting, Golos, and a crowdsourcing platform which allows users to report incidences of electoral fraud, Zubr.

“Two hours later, basically YouTube access was blocked, in order for people not to be able to watch streams, then the entire internet started to be shut down,” said Milta. Google, Facebook, and WhatsApp all suffered access issues, as well as independent news sources. Belarusian telecom providers issued apologies for mass outages, and ultimately, the end-to-end encrypted messaging app Telegram was one of the only services left.

“We enabled our anti-censorship tools in Belarus so that Telegram remained available for most users there. However, the connection is still very unstable as internet is at times shut off completely in the country,” Telegram founder Pavel Durov wrote on Twitter on August 10.

Smaller companies are increasingly filling the gaps left by the tech behemoths—not just in Belarus but on an international level, said Jillian C. York, Director of International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “I think we’ll see a lot more movement towards smaller platforms and safer platforms for organizing but less so for getting the word out,” York said, suggesting people retained stronger links to their existing networks on Facebook. On a global scale the bigger social networks such as Facebook appear to have a bias towards “governments in general over the people.”