Is Crimea In Russia? Internet Companies Have Different Answers

judgecorp (778838) writes "Three weeks after Russia asserted that Crimea is part of its territory, the social networks have a problem: how to categories their users from the region? Facebook and the largest Russian social network, Vkontakte, still say Crimeans are located in Ukraine, while other Russian social networks say they are Russians. Meanwhile, on Wikipedia, an edit war has resulted in Crimea being part of Russia, but shaded a different colour to signify the territory is disputed. Search engine Yandex is trying to cover both angles: its maps service gives a different answer, depending on which location you send your query from."

Comments

is this seriously

[etash]

stuff that matters? This is a trivial detail, and in due time all websites will list it under Russia.

Re:is this seriously

[mi]

in due time all websites will list it under Russia.

Only the Russian websites will do so. The rest will list it as "Ukrainian territory under Russian occupation". Unwieldy, perhaps, but reflecting the truth.

Or, as they keep saying about Jerusalem, it will go something like this: "Annexed by Russia in a move not recognized internationally."

Re:is this seriously

[T.E.D.]

The current government there is a party that got less than 10% of the vote in the last Crimean regional election, and was essentially appointed by Putin after his troops moved in. So it owes its entire political existence not to local support, but to the support of some guys in Moscow.

Its possible that if you had a completely free plebiscite on the issue, without Russian troops and "militias" backed by them standing around with guns, the people of Crimea would have willingly voted for something similar to what they have now. Its also possible they wouldn't. We'll never know now, because it doesn't look like there will be anything like a free election there again for quite a while.

Re:is this seriously

[Luckyo]

How high are we talking here? They voted with participation of over 85%, and of that vote, overwhelming majority agreed to annexation.

To compare, average Western country has election for government with voter activity barely around 50% (often much lower) and ruling parties are often elected with very small minorities of under 20% of those who came to vote.

So your requirement is largely met, unless you're planning on insisting on 100% kind of numbers.

Notably: OECD received invitation to the elections to monitor them. They came under massive pressure from EU and US and ended up declining the invitation.

Ukraine's borders were changed by use of force

[mi]

Russia annexed the province by use of force. Any and all counter-arguments like "but they voted" are meaningless: first, the voting took place under the "gentle" guidance of Russian military. Then, even if you think, it is legitimate for a referendum on whether to join a foreign power to take place while under occupation by that same power, the vote was fraudulent. For example, in Sevastopol the number of people showing up for vote was 123% of the eligible voters.

And, finally, even without the above two arguments, would Russia accept a referendum by residents of the Kuril Island, for example, on breaking away from the Motherland and joining Japan? Would the US accept the results of Southern California (or Southern Texas) voting to break away and join Mexico?

Neither would, of course. The Crimean referendum is a joke. A sad joke perpetrated by Russia-the-bully on Ukraine weakened by internal strife and years of mismanagement (to which Russia heartily contributed just for this purpose, BTW).

Re:Ukraine's borders were changed by use of force

[jbolden]

Russia handled this badly in a lot of ways. But in the end what we know is that once Russia offered, if there were a fair and free referendum the Crimean people would like to join Russia and leave Ukraine. I see no reason that people should be trapped in a country they don't want to be a part of. I believe self determination gives people, not just states, the right to change borders.

And yes I think if Texas voted to join Mexico the USA would accept it. I can't imagine the USA holding millions of people and hundreds of square miles of territory by force. That would completely undermine everything else about American democracy. Americans like to have a government by the people for the people. A government imposed is not either.

Re:Ukraine's borders were changed by use of force

[rolfwind]

You apparently never heard of the American Civil War then.

Re:Ukraine's borders were changed by use of force

[mi]

Kosovo comes to mind

Kosovo did not vote to join the US — nor any of the others, whose military was occupying the land.

Finally, would the British Empire accept a referendum by residents of it's colonies in the new world

As a matter of fact, India left the British empire without war. Look up Ghandi...

Those sorts of things are not achieved by throwing roses at your enemies.

We'll never know, what roses (or stones) Crimeans would've thrown at Kyiv on their own — had it been so clear-cut, Russia would not have had the need to occupy the peninsula before the referendum — nor would they have had the need to shut off Ukrainian TV rebroadcasts over it, replacing them with Putin's lying propaganda.

What we do know is that the fraudulent vote took place under the guns of the occupiers.

Re:Ukraine's borders were changed by use of force

[Antique Geekmeister]

> And yes I think if Texas voted to join Mexico the USA would accep

Not a _chance_. Texas has oil, just like Iraq.

Re:Ukraine's borders were changed by use of force

[ageoffri]

The American Civil War was not a war over slavery. It was a war over Federal vs. State control. Slavery was an emotional issue used to by both sides as part of the their argument on control, but ultimately it was a secondary issue. If it was about slavery why did Lincoln "free" slaves in only the secessionist States?

Re:Ukraine's borders were changed by use of force

[NotDrWho]

It was a war over Federal vs. State control

Yeah, control of slavery.

Re:Ukraine's borders were changed by use of force

[squiggleslash]

The American Civil War was not a war over slavery. It was a war over Federal vs. State control

It really was about slavery. The notion the South were just concerned about Fed being "too powerful" and being likely to "force" them to do things they didn't want to do over them kinda ignores the fact that whole Fugitive Slave thing, where the South was using the Federal government to force the North to do things they didn't want to do, and the Federal government turned out not to be powerful enough to do it.

And it was the complete failure of the Fugitive Slave acts, and the fact that the whole free trade/movement thing meant that without such a law, the South would be competely unable to deal with escaping slaves, that created the actual triggers for the creation of the Confederacy.

States Rights? There's a stronger argument that the North was fighting for those over the South. After failing to work within the system to force the North to do things they found completely abhorent, the South wanted to bypass the constitution completely by declaring independence and using its economic and military might instead. The North even limited its response to a silent "WTF" until the South fired first. The rest is history.

Doesn't matter. I block all of Ukraine anyway.

[Dr. Manhattan]

Set up a website to support my Android app, and after a couple months I started getting a flood of referrer spam filling up my logs. All of it from a couple dozen different netblocks in the Ukraine. I tried a couple different techniques to filter out the bad guys, but at this point I just toss all the netblocks into the reject pile in my htaccess file.

Does anyone actually get legitimate traffic from the Ukraine anyway?

Sure, the real-world violence and power struggles are sad. But from an internet perspective, I have a hard time seeing much to care about.

Re:This

[MightyMartian]

Which is rather like claiming the residents of South Tyrol are Austrian, and perhaps more apropos to the Crimean situation, stating Austria is German.

How precisely Russia threatening to swallow up any of its neighbors' territory because ethnic Russians live there differs from Anschluss escapes.me.

Re:"use of force"

[mi]

what was breaking Kosovo from Serbia than? "use of out-of-this-world-force"?

Kosovo was torn away from Serbia to become independent — not to be annexed by one of the powers doing the tearing away. That's the major difference.

NATO fucked up when it broke sovereign state by use of ... flowers?

NATO intervened in Yugoslavia after the Belgrade regime committed serious crimes against humanity — and only after the UN-forces demonstrably failed to end the abuses. Now Russian propaganda keeps repeating the same accusations against Ukraine's current government — except Russia is obviously lying.

But, no doubt, Putin will thank you for this rhetorical cover. He needs every sympathizer (or even a neutral) in the West he get...

Think Back to the 1930s

[DERoss]

The Crimea is Putin's Sudetenland.
The Ukraine will be Putin's Czechoslovakia.
See http://www.rossde.com/editoria....

Google also gives different answers

[swillden]

Google Maps shows Crimea as part of Russia to users from Russia, and part of Ukraine to the rest of the world.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/04/12/302337754/google-maps-displays-crimean-border-differently-in-russia-u-s

This is nothing new. As the article above mentions the name of the Arabian Gulf also changes depending on where you are, and mentions that there are many more cases. I believe Taiwan may be another. This approach is clearly a compromise, and like all compromises, makes no one really happy.