Red censorship

One of the most popular left-wing Internet projects FORUM.msk is closed at the request of the Central Election Commission. The shutdown is due to a direct instruction from the Central Election Commission to law enforcement agencies. The decision to close the site was made by the Masterhost company, which maintains the server. The site was stopped at 6:00 p.m. the day before. Previously, the site reported that temporarily all articles and news from FORUM.msk were moving to the Pravda.info website. The Bureau of Special Technical Events of the Ministry of Internal Affairs appealed to the provider with a demand to remove from the Internet page an interview with deputy candidate Vasily Shandybin, in which the Central Election Commission saw “signs of illegal election campaigning.” Previously, employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs made a similar request directly to the editor-in-chief of the site, Anatoly Baranov, but he refused to fulfill it. In an interview, Shandybin commented in harsh terms on the nomination of Senator Lyudmila Narusova as a candidate for State Duma deputy. The Central Election Commission working group on information disputes, led by Maya Grishina, first expressed complaints about the material back in early October. The Central Election Commission recognized Shandybin's statements as propaganda. Meanwhile, Baranov regarded the Central Election Commission’s demand to remove Shandybin’s interview from the site as censorship. “Such actions of the Central Election Commission, especially before the elections, are a blatant violation of the Constitution,” Baranov believes. “My server is closed at the bell, like a janitor’s room, like a toilet stall, without even asking my opinion. I was not called to the commission on information disputes, I communicate with Churov through newspapers, with the police - by phone.” Baranov said that in the near future he plans to reopen the site under the same name on foreign hosting.