Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.