Give Lukashenko his own Lu-net! (Belarus)

"It is time to stop the anarchy on the internet," announced Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko in 2007. "We cannot allow this great technological achievement of man to be turned into an information garbage heap."

He proposed increased internet censorship, including a law that would require all websites considered a threat to the regime to be registered by their owners.

In response to Lukashenko's plans, activists from the online community Third Way (known for the creation and distribution of online political cartoons) launched the LuNet campaign, presented as a 53rd "birthday gift" to the president. The "gift" consisted of four "services": a video sharing site (LuTube), a search engine (Lundex), a blogging service (LuJournal) and a web portal (tut.lu).

Each name cleverly plays on the name of the original service on which it is modeled, thereby giving Lukashenko what he appeared to want -- his very own version of the internet.

“There are no enemies’ voices, but..... you won’t hear any other voices except your own,” declares a letter to Lukashenko on the LuNet homepage.

In an interview with Global Voices, Pavel Marosau from Third Way explains that they chose these specific services for Lunet because they were the most popular among Belarusian internet users at the time.

“By showing in a satirical and a little bit hypertrophied form what model of internet Lukashenko is about to introduce, what changes they may face if government attempts to put internet under control, we wanted to raise awareness of Belarusian internet users," he explains.

The content on LuNet includes government propaganda amid ironic posts. But although humour is central to the campaign, LuNet stands apart from other satirical news websites like India's Faking News or Venezuala's El Chigüire Bipolar , in that it also provides a scary glimpse into just what the internet of the future could look like if Lukashenko got his way.

FURTHER READING
Tactics That Tickle: Laughing All the Way to the Win, New Tactics, 2010.
Lukashenko's Customised Version of [the] Internet, e-belarus.org, 2007.
Belarus' Creative Opposition, Iryna Vidanava (PDF)

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