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"Bloody January" in Kazakhstan: shutdown as a new form of terror

Publication

Abstract

Shutting down the Internet has its own history in Kazakhstan, but before that, the shutdown was more of a way of censorship. The events, which in Kazakhstan are called "Bloody January", bring the shutdown to a qualitatively new level.

A combination of factors (the use of stun grenades, the order to shoot to kill, murders, the report of 20,000 terrorists, the introduction of CSTO troops) made the shutdown not an act of censorship, but an act of state terror. Interestingly, the shutdown is practically not interpreted by anyone as a form of state terror.

One can, for example, find the opinion of Simon Angus of Monash University, who called Myanmar's nighttime Internet blackouts a form of psychological terror, but so far this interpretation of the suppression of information has traditionally been interpreted as a form of censorship, and the damage from the shutdown is still considered a purely economic problem.