Yet while the internet allowed dissidents to overcome the communication barriers inherent in geographic dispersion and political repression, it did little to alleviate long-standing internal feuds. The internet is a useful tool, but it raises questions of anonymity, authorship, and audience that are far more problematic for activists operating in a cynical political culture -- a hallmark of Uzbekistan's dictatorship-- than for activists in more open societies.

You might think that someone should have seen something like Gulsumoy Abdujalilova coming. But there aren't always clear ways to establish, prove, or disprove political trust online for citizens of an authoritarian state. When suspicions about Gulsumoy's existence were first raised, one friend of mine, a fellow communications scholar who studies the former USSR, looked at Gulsumoy's page and immediately pronounced it a fake. When I asked her why, she admitted she didn't really have a reason -- it just felt fake.

Looking at the page again, there are signs that might stand out for a Western audience: the lack of any real photos (Gulsumoy used a headshot of a Turkish model for her profile picture-- it was openly not her photo, like when someone uses a celebrity's picture as a joke), the dearth of comments from her 114 friends, the use of a pseudonym (she posted under "Gulsumoy Andijon," a reference to the site of the 2005 massacre), and the heavy emphasis on the political over the personal. But to see these as signs of a hoax assumes a normative standard of what a Facebook profile "should" look like. Many Uzbeks are selective or even deceptive about what they reveal about themselves on Facebook, for they are aware that the government is watching them and know giving too much up could be risky. They use Facebook to access information, not to share it. They use Facebook not to define themselves, but to find refuge, however tenuous, from the state's definition of who they are, what they can say, and who they could become.

When all information is assumed fraudulent and all sources suspect, when your worst suspicions about your government are routinely confirmed and denied, when online communication -- itself nebulous and malleable -- is your only means of interaction, what do you do? You follow your principles. "I have always believed people who need help, and while sometimes I don't have time and opportunity to respond to a call immediately, I always try to help people honestly and sincerely to the best of my ability, something that is very much needed in Uzbekistan," Urlaeva, the activist who futilely tried to track down the Gulsumoy case, told EurasiaNet. But in Uzbekistan, following your principles often gets you nowhere. And there's not much you can do about it.

Believe it or not, the Gulsumoy hoax is not Uzbekistan's strangest Facebook fabrication. That honor belongs to Shavkat Mirziyoev, the very real prime minister of Uzbekistan, whose Facebook appeared in July 2011, and was soon revealed to be that of an imposter. While Mirziyoev's page seemed a tad dubious to begin with -- he is a Leon Panetta fan, apparently--its Uzbek-language contents were so bureaucratic and bland that the point of the farce has never been clear. The page's workman-like rendering of Uzbek government triumphs did not function as satire or reveal any notable information. Even once exposed, the profile has been updated, steadily, for almost half a year, with the PM's dreary doppelganger acquiring over 1900 friends.