Roskomnadzor blocked a page of a Chicago blogging platform due to the work of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe

By decision of Roskomnadzor, the page of the ChicagoNow blogging platform was blocked because of the girl’s photograph, reports Roskomsvoboda . Media calls ChicagoNow (chicagonow.com) the largest blogging platform in Chicago.

According to the register of banned sites, the decision to block was made on February 1, but telecom operators received information about it only on February 7. The reason for the blocking was a photograph of a girl taken by photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in 1976, notes Roskomsvoboda. The department saw elements of child pornography in this image.

The platform belongs to the media holding Chicago Tribune Media Group and, along with the blocked site, other projects of the holding are located on the same IP address, including the Chicago youth newspaper The Mash and a large Spanish-language publication in Chicago, San Diego and Los Angeles. As Roskomsvoboda explains, entering a specific page address into the register also involves including the domain and IP address of the site in the list. Thus, telecom operators can restrict access by IP address and domain “at their discretion.”

On February 6 , it became known that Roskomnadzor blocked the page of the British auction house Bonhams because of a photograph by American photographer Jock Sturges put up at auction. Last fall, an exhibition of the photographer’s works opened in Moscow at the Lumiere Brothers Center for Photography, but it was soon closed. At first, Senator Elena Mizulina and Children's Ombudsman Anna Kuznetsova were outraged by Sturges's work, and on the morning of September 25, dozens of young people wearing jackets with the inscription “Officers of Russia” blocked the entrance to the gallery. Several journalists were allowed into the room for a while, then an unknown man entered the gallery with them and doused the photographs with an unidentified liquid, presumably urine.

On February 9, journalists drew attention to the blocking of the Voat community page. on Twitter At first, Roskomnadzor reported that the site was blocked because of an image of a girl in ASCII style (a sequence of characters), in which the agency saw child pornography. Then Roskomnadzor clarified that the blocking was related to the userpic, and not the ASCII image.