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A BBC poll reported that 90% of Russians regularly drink anti-freeze.
But not all was as it seemed. Russian bloggers, taking exception to a Russian language BBC article about alcohol abuse in Izhevsk, decided to spam the BBC’s online poll:
Within hours, sometimes at a rate of two votes per second, more than 25,000 testified to being regular consumers of antifreeze and the like. Even after BBC computers zeroed out the results the next morning, the votes kept piling in, with over 90% blithely confirming suspicions that Russians are pretty much liquored up all the time.
People power, or cyber-terrorism? You decide.
Update: Mmd Russia Blog has more, including details of a few other stories where Russian bloggers have flexed their muscles.
I can’t believe that it was ever posted in the first place. It was such a stupid poll that it deserved to be spammed.
The problem is that the world would believe the story. But I live in Moscow and You almost believe that some of them would drink anything that is called alcohol. It is a stupid poll!!!!!!
Kyle
That’s pretty funny.
To be fair though, quite a few Russians DID, at one point, drink anti-freeze – or anything they could get their hands on, for that matter. I can’t recall which book it was from – The Fall of Berlin, 1945, or Stalingrad (both by Antony Beevor) – but in one of them, there were quite a few accounts about Russians dying from drinking anti-freeze and other not-drinkable-things.