LiveJournal is censoring Russian critics of Putin, apparently at Russia's request:
The company, LiveJournal, shows an error message to users inside Russia who try to read a blog maintained by prominent activist and politician Alexei Navalny, a vocal critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Navalny uses the service to post about Putin, the Russian government and politics. Users in other countries can read Navalny’s blog without seeing the error message.
This is, of course, unremarkable. LiveJournal is essentially dead in most of the rest of the world, but is huge in Russia. It is probably not a stretch to say that Russia is the lifeblood of LiveJournal. So in that situation, the company is almost certainly not gong to close up over the blog of one dissident. As a former member of the company says in the article:
Dash doesn’t envy LiveJournal if indeed they’re blocking Navalny after being faced with a choice between blocking him and being shut down in their biggest market.
Hypothetically, if that was the choice, “even if [LiveJournal] has to censor a million people, the other 2.9 million might be worth it for [the company],” he said.
You cannot throw electrons at political problems and expect them to change anything. Sites can be pressured or blocked or admins arrested or barred from the country. There is no such thing as cyberspace: the servers and wires that the Internet lives on our physical things with physical homes that depend on physical connections to create the internet we all know and love. And anything that lives in the physical world can be controlled or crippled. Want to change the world? You cannot just assume the Internet will do it for you. Politics matter much more than technology.