Gregory Asmolov

I was born in Moscow, lived most of my life in Jerusalem, spent 3 years in Washington DC (where I did MA at GW). But now I live in London and my major role is doctoral student at PhD program in New media, Innovation and Literacy at the London School of Economics media department. The topic of my research is development of online political institutions and ICT based models of governance in crisis situations.

I also worked as a consultant on information technology, new media, and social media projects for The World Bank, American Councils for International Education, and Internews, and was a research assistant at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Previously I worked as a journalist for major Russian daily newspapers Kommersant and Novaya Gazeta, and served as news editor and analyst for Israeli TV.

Alexey Sidorenko and I were founders of Help Map, the crowdsourcing platform, which was used to coordinate assistance to victims of wildfires in Russia in 2010 and won a Russian National Internet Award for best project in the “State and Society” category.

My Russian blog (since 2002): http://pustovek.livejournal.com/
You can reach me through Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/asmolov

Email Gregory Asmolov

Latest posts by Gregory Asmolov

Russia: Kremlin Removes Re-Tweet From Presidential Account

RuNet Echo  7 December 2011

RuNetizens were surprised to see president Medvededv re-tweet a message [ru] with cursing against bloggers. The re-tweet was removed, but Kremlin published an explanation that “illegal engagement with presidential account has been made” and that “those responsible will be punished.” Vedomosti reminded [ru] that recently Medveved had complained he couldn't respond to...

Russia: Election and the “Other Side of the Panopticon”

RuNet Echo  7 December 2011

The protests of recent days in Moscow were triggered by the common feeling of many Russians that the parliamentary election results are not legitimate. Gregory Asmolov analyzes the role of the Internet in exposure of falsifications and the power change between state and citizens in the new information environment.

Russia: Massive DDoS Attacks Against Independent Websites on the Election Day

RuNet Echo  4 December 2011

An unprecedented wave of DDoS attacks [ru] against independent websites on the election day in Russia: sites affected include thenewtimes.ru, echo.msk.ru, novayagazeta.ru, kommersant.ru, publicpost.ru, slon.ru, Bolshoy Gorod (bg.ru), golos.org, ikso.org, ridus.ru, zaks.ru (Saint Petersburg), pryaniki.org (Tula), crowdsourcing platform “Karta Narusheniy” and the LiveJournal platform. Many media organizations are using Facebook and...

Russia: Facebook Bots Massively Vote for Putin

RuNet Echo  17 October 2011

Russian online magazine “Slon” exposes [ru] significant increase in activity of Facebook fake accounts who vote for Putin in online opinion polls. The bots are active not only on Facebook but also on online media websites that allow to use Facebook profiles for voting.

Russia: Investigative Journalists Expose Security Services Monitoring Internet

RuNet Echo  13 October 2011

Andrey Soldatov and Irina Borogan, famous investigative journalists, describe [ru] software and methods used  by Russian security services to monitor the Internet. Journalists argue that while Federal Security Service (FSB) can easily monitor Russian social networks (like Vkontakte, Odnoklassniki and others), it has problems with monitoring foreign platforms (like Facebook and...

Russia: Putin Gets Twitter Hashtag for His Birthday

RuNet Echo  10 October 2011

#CпасибоПутинуЗаЭто (“Thanks to Putin for This”) hashtag that resembles the Soviet “Thanks to the party for this” became a “Twitter sensation” according to the Wall Street Journal and a “Twitter storm,” according to The Moscow News. The campaign that was started [ru] by a pro-Kremlin blogger Vladimir Burmatov as a way...

Russia: A New Online Game Might Change Offline Moscow

RuNet Echo  27 September 2011

A graduate of Strelka Institute Andrey Goncharov gave an interview about his final project an online game “Crowdsourced Moscow 2012″. According to the interview the game  can contibute to real democracy and allow people to participate in reshaping the offline public space of their city through online.

Russia: Pro-Kremlin Youth Movement Leader Seeks New Internet ‘Activists’

RuNet Echo  27 September 2011

A journalist  from “Afisha” magazine had succeded to attend a secret meeting in the underground Moscow bunker dedicated to the training of a new generation of pro-Kremlin Internet activists organized by a leader of “Nashi” youth movement Vasiliy Yakemenko. Yakemenko demanded from pariticipants to initiate citizen Internet-based campaigns and argued that the main goal...

Russia: New Legislation to Allow “Creative Commons” License

RuNet Echo  16 August 2011

Russian Communication Ministry submitted  to President Medvedev a project for legislation update that would allow using “Creative Commons” (CC) copyright license in Russia, newspaper Vedomosti reports [ru]. The project is a follow-up to a meeting between Medvedev and leaders of Russian Internet community [en] where the president promised to support...

Russia: One Million Twitter Accounts in Russian

RuNet Echo  11 August 2011

The number of Twitter accounts in Russian crossed the point of one million, according to recent reseach [ru] by Russian Internet company Yandex. Now, Russian speakers publish around 370,000 tweets a day (comparing to 150,00o a year ago).  The percentage of daily active  Twitter users (of the total Russian speakers)...

Russia: New Legislation Against Online Extremism

RuNet Echo  7 August 2011

Russian government submitted a new anti-extremism legislation for approval to the Russian Parliament.  News agency ITAR-TASS reports that according to the news legislation, distribution of extremist content online can be punished with 5 years in jail. Vzglyad website explains the legislation treates the publication of content in blogs as public...

Russia: Bloggers Initiated Day of Garbage Cleaning

RuNet Echo  7 August 2011

Thousands of people participated in the event “Bloggers against garbage” that happened in dozens of Russian cities. A special  community was created in Livejournal that includes many reports about the event. People used Twitter, Facebook, Vkontakte and other online platforms to coordinate the blog-based subbotnik [ENG]. The event was an...