In Uzbekistan, future journalists are forced to trolling
A massive attack on the well-known blogger in Uzbekistan, Cyril Altman, was made by students of the University of Journalism and Mass Communications of Uzbekistan. The reason was the blogger’s comment “I don’t know what’s happening here, but when I see this photo, it sends a chill up and down my spine, and a tear is in the corner of my eye. It’s a true love for the motherland”. The text was placed under the photo of the deputies of the Uzbek Parliament who were singing national anthem.
Future journalists took hostility against the author’s self-irony. As if on command, dozens of students began to post angry posts. For example, one of the young critics accused the blogger of laughing at the state.
His classmates began to threaten him with a court and point out problems of Altman’s state of mind. Hinting at the blogger’s nationality, his critic wrote that “even Judas against his background looks more decent. If you ask, what about freedom of speech. I will answer you that freedom of speech ends where the insult of people begins!”
“An extensive campaign of bullying on a social network showed that Uzbekistan already has a mature community of trolls. In professionalism, they are still inferior to Russian like-minded people, but with higher education they will quickly improve their qualifications,” a political scientist from Uzbekistan said to ACCA.
According to him, initially the National Security Service (now the State Security Service) was engaged in their formation. “After the Andijan shooting in 2005, comments began to appear under publications defending Karimov and his politics. In 2011, anonymous pro-government comments appeared in defense of the daughter of the President Islam Karimov, Lola Karimova-Tillaeva,” the expert recalls. “At that time in Paris, she lost the libel case, when she was called the daughter of a dictator. Often the State Security Service attracted journalists from state-owned media to expose the enemies of the people from among independent journalists.”
Under the President Mirziyoev, in 2018, the Youth Union of Uzbekistan “took care” of trolls and bots. In May, it held a seminar for 150 young reporters. Journalists managed to find out that a group of active members of the Youth Union of Uzbekistan are trolling. By order of the administration of the Youth Union, each of them opened 4-5 Facebook accounts to organize trolling attacks against users who express negative opinions about the organization.
In the same year, the activists of the Youth Union, who were the students of Tashkent University of Information Technologies, slandered Umid Gafurov, the author of the Troll.uz blog, in the network. The reason for trolling was blogger posts about the higher education system in the country and the university.
In 2019, the leadership of the political party “Milliy tiklanish” demanded that its members attack the blogger Nozim Safari, who made unpleasant conclusions about the party’s activities.
