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I didn't blog a while, preferring to put my witty comments in del.icio.us -- in part because there's been too much travel, as usual (I was in Kyrgyzstan and Russia in the last two weeks--and many more before that).

But I just couldn't resist to bring everyone's attention to yet another -- and this time really ugly -- use of cyberactivism and blogs in Russia. I've already written several times about the popular Russian blog search service, Yandex Blogs. These guys run a Top5 daily posts ranking, which is the most influential thing in the Russian blogosphere.

Getting there is fairly straightforward: make sure that you get enough links from other blogs--and here you go, you are first in Top30 and, if things go really well, in Top5. As I've also written earlier, many people have used this system --which is very easy to trick -- for good by highlighting the great social injustices happening to them (in Russia, they abound, of course).

However, lately, more and more extremist young groups are turning to Yandex Top5 to game the system and spread their message as widely as possible. Below is a screenshot of how it looks like today and you can also check for yourself here.

This is what happened today. Somebody by the nick of colonizer wrote a post entitled "The Caucasus enters Russia", which featured a combination of profiles with photos from a leading Russian social network, vkontankte.ru (it's a Russian LinkedIn). Now, if you haven't guessed yet, the profiles belonged to young representatives of the Caucasus region -- which is, broadly speaking, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, plus a number of republics from the North Caucasus region  (which belongs to Russia).

Below are two screenshots from that post--as you can see, the list of people whose profiles the post "featured" is quite long:

Now, all those guys featured in the post study at very good universities in Russia and it's almost obvious they are heading for a good career afterwards. This is the theme that the author of the post plays up: "those are our future lawyers, economists, politicians, entrepreneurs-- and there are thousands of them".  So, the message is obvious: if you care about Russia's future, you should make sure that these people from the Caucasus are not anywhere in the top ranks of the country-- this is the basic point of the post.

What's worse, the post's author linked to a video that was supposedly featured on one of the profiles of these young men. The video is a clip mashed up entirely of user-generated videos of darkly skinned men (again, supposedly from the Caucasus) beating up ethnic Russians. The soundtrack is a rap song (in Russian) by a band called "The Caucasian Brotherhood", which basically says that the nations of the Caucasus are going to unite and dominate Russia.

This is the video-- it's GRAPHIC, so please make sure you do want to see those scenes.

I hesitated whether to embed it on my blog or not, but decided to go ahead, not because I support the message (which, of course, I don't), but just to highlight how much user-generated racism is out there. I am willing to bet that the majority of horrendous mini-clips in this video have been shot using a mobile phone (the quality speaks for itself). Yet, when mixed with the ominous texts, the video may, indeed, have a strong impact on Russian psyche (never mind that there are many more cases of the opposite happening -- the young white Russian males beating up people from the Caucasus and Central Asia). I don't know if those videos are real or staged-- some of them may be staged for sure, but some do look quite genuine.

The original post, as one may expect, contained "a call to arms": repost something about it in your blog and make sure we get into Yandex Top5 and influence the regular, neutral Russians ('"those who still have illusions about living in a multicultural society"). This is one of the most dangerous aspects of the networked public sphere we now exist in: it can be used for bad as easily as for good, and although the good guys do innovate a lot, the bad guys will often spot their methods and apply it to their own goals. This sounds banal, but that's how the Russian right-wing movements seem to be using Yandex Top5, which has been used for many good deeds previously.

What's also scary here is how somebody mined social networks to find all this data and contextualize it. I am thinking loud here, but imagine if those guys also belonged to a Facebook-like group, say, "students from the Caucasus". It would take 5 minutes to just get information about all members of this group, publicize it widely on LiveJournal, and crowdsource the smearing of these guys. So here we go: blogging, social networking, crowdsourcing-- but who would have thought that the racists would be just as smart?

Needless to say, the post generated hundreds of comments and has been reposted by other people 430 times (to give you a sense of perspective, other entries in Top5: 31, 18, 19, 7, and 13 "reposts" respectively).  The video has been viewed 950 times at the time of writing (I don't know if embeds are counted in video.mail.ru -- it could be many more).

Cases like this are getting more and more widespread in the Russian blogosphere, which is very disturbing. I'll be following the case and reading through all those hundreds of comments, but I've yet failed to see a strong social response to this -- unfortunately, there is no way to "un-digg" or "bury" such posts from Yandex Blogs, even if there was a group of active people who strongly protested against what was happening.