More than 5,000 sites covered military censorship

The main initiator of the locks was the Prosecutor General’s Office - there are many large publications and their “mirrors” its lists, but more and more often decisions of regional courts respond to any materials related to Ukrainian events are being made into this list.

The number of sites blocked for reasons of military censorship reached 5300 .

During the monitoring of the register of prohibited information, we again discovered that the general “leadership” in this matter is still demonstrated by the General Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation .

The largest number of banned resources was collected by its decision number 27-31-2020/ID2145-22 , issued even before the adoption of the law on the inadmissibility of the dissemination of information that could throw a shadow into the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. The first blocking on its basis took place on February 24 of the current year, hooking the sites DOXA, BBC, “Voice of America”, DW, Ukrainian RBC, Bellingcat, “Caucasian Knot”, TJ, Twitter, Facebook and its messenger, UNIAN, The Village, Petersburg Edition “Paper” Medusa, Chess News, Activatica, Mediazona, Interlocutor, Radio Liberty, Echo of the Caucasus, Republic, the investigative project “Agency.ru”, 7x7 magazine. Horizontal Russia ”, Perm magazine Zvezda, Taiga.info, Chelyabinsk independent edition of Lentacel, mirrors of many of the above sites, as well as a large number of online cinematers and pirate sites. Already in the first weeks after making, this decision collected hundreds of sites, and after incomplete five months, their number exceeded 3,000.

Many sites are blocked along the “mask” (for example, *.zona.media), that is, with all domains and subdomains.

Other decisions of the supervisory authority were later blocked by the Carto.ru website, which collected all cartoons about Masyanya, Dmitry Kory Korzev, IT`S My City, website of the opposition journalist Alexander Sotnik, the Mediazona, the Mediazone, website of the REPULIC. Central Asia ”, colta.ru,“ Amnesty International. Eurasia ”, a civilian human rights project“ For Human Rights ”, a website of the organization’s observation organization“ Voice ”, Tomsk news agency“ TV2 ”, the newspaper“ Pskov Province ”, a website of fans of Kyiv Dynamo.

A separate solution was blocked by Instagram .

Very often, the locks were “rejoiced”, and if some domains are scored in the search engine, you can see a restriction on the same site, but on the basis of different solutions. As, for example, in the case of a “mediazone” or “taiga” (the latter, the Prosecutor General’s Office has already “corrected” this bug, leaving the publication under a single blocking).

Later, on the basis of completely different decisions, they got into the register: “obscurantist”, “interlocutor”, the site of journalist Alexander Nevzorov , “people of Lake Baikal”, a JoOble vacancies, “cold”, “landfill”. Media ”, one of the most popular chess sites Chess.com ,“ Present ”, German newspaper Bild , Human Rights Watch ( HRW ), Popular Finnish newspaper Ilta-Sanomat, online encyclopedia of visual art of Wikiart , Site of the popular Stalker 2 game.

The Prosecutor General’s Office of the Internet resources of organizations, in no way related to politics, did not bypass. For example, websites of the Internet company that provides Hostinger domain services, AOL media companies, Zoho Mail, Women's Forum “Kidstaff”, the Kidstaff Media, Japanese Mobile Operator KDDI AU, and FORKLOG, the FORCLOG Mobile Mobile, were blocked. Clutch, interactive training resources for programming and creating FructCode sites, “L2 MIRAGE” server for the Lineage 2 online game and others.

Already expectedly continued to be blocked by sites of news publications, human rights restrictions, political parties, public figures:

two additional URLs of the Ukrainian news resource "Country";
“America’s news in Russian - USA.One”;
“German news in Russian - Germania.one”;
Independent online magazine "Russian Monitor";
edition "European Truth" ("єvropeiska truth");
Belarusian edition of The Village project;
The site of Alexei Exler;
Ukrainian edition "League";
"Like this";
"Sukhumi.info";
"Interfax-Ukraine";
Helsingin Sanomat (Finland);
Politiken (Denmark);
Ukrainian "5 channel";
Blog of the Ural journalist Dmitry Korzev;
website of the human rights center "Memorial";
TV channel "Direct" (Ukraine);
Radio Azattyk - Kyrgyz service "Radio Liberty";
Finnish state television and radio compans Yle;
Ukrainian Forbes;
Radio Azatutyun - Armenian Service "Radio Liberty";
The site of the Vesna Movement "Impich 2.0" to send an appeal about impeachment to Vladimir Putin;
"Odintsovo-Info";
Ukrainian edition "ґrati";
The site of the Altai regional branch of the Yabloko party;
"Vitebsk courier";
"Radio Svaboda" (Belarus);
FAKEOFF;
Informnapalm;
"Loader";
"Media slope";
website of the Crimean Tatar Resource Center;
"Russia of indigenous peoples."

This list, of course, is much longer, we have chosen the most striking examples of those hundreds, if not thousands, Internet sites.

The last high -profile cases of military censorship are associated with fairly large publications. So, the Prosecutor General’s Office limited access to HTTPS to the Telegraph reference, because of which the entire site of the popular British edition was not loaded in Russia.

In the same way, a link to the photo bank of depositphotos was blocked , which, by the way, closed the opportunity for Russians and Belarusians to use their services back in March of this year.

The other day, the site of the influential German information publication Die Welt came under the full blocking of the Mask. As a basis for blocking, calls for extremism and riots are indicated , but this is unlikely. Most likely, the authorities did not like publications about Ukrainian events. Moreover, previously not a single specific link from this resource did not fall into the register, and no one publicly expressed claims like DW.

In early June, there was a case when military censorship was also applied, but the register did not reach the domains. Regional media began to massively delete the pages of the memory of military personnel who died during the “special military operation”. The reason for this was the decision of the Svetlogorsk City Court of the Kaliningrad Region in relation to the publication 60.ru, which is part of one media group - the “network of city portals” Shkulev Media Holding. As a result of this, the relevant information from their sites was deleted from the holding in other regions. Naturally, in the list of those 5.3 thousand sites of these links.

By the way, the courts in the regions also gradually begin to break the monopoly of the Prosecutor General’s Office into “special operational” locks. As we noted earlier, the first restriction of access to the Baltic project Delfi occurred on the initiative of the Central District Court of Kaliningrad for March 4, 2022. First, the court sent only one link from the Lithuanian website of the project, where there was information about the losses of the Russian army as a result of the “military special operation”, and then completely blocked the entire site. Later, the Prosecutor General’s Office already blocked the Latvian and Estonian versions of the project (both Russian -speaking).

Other courts, from Kaliningrad to Khabarovsk, then repeatedly entered the register of prohibited links with materials related to the above events. Most often, this applies to the Potential “Partisans” of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine who dispersed to various Ukrainian forums, which told Molotov’s cocktail, besides everything else. Information is also actively blocked about possible serious offenses committed by Russian military personnel against the civilian population of territories temporarily or to this day under the control of the Russian Federation.

A special category of military censorship can also be attributed to the blocking of materials about hazing , as well as articles that in one way or another criticize the call, especially regarding Crimeans. This tendency has developed long until February 24, 2022. In our opinion, both these and the special operation of the restriction of information are essentially manifestations of the same censorship, although neither hazard nor “anti -I” entered the aforementioned 5 thousand sites.

We talk about the most “fresh” locks almost daily in our Telegram channel , noting with the hashtag #RKSK_Tlokovka . From there you can quickly learn about which new sites have been on the list of prohibited.

Our previous reviews on military censorship:

UPD 14.07.2022: The number of sites blocked by the Prosecutor General’s Office exceeded 5400.

UPD 07/19/2022: Already more than 5.5 thousand. The dynamics is impressive-frozen.