In Russia, an article about the “Russia without Putin” campaign from an Estonian publication, the website of this campaign, the website of the “undesirable” RAND Corporation and the list of Vologda residents who died in the war were blocked. Roskomsvoboda writes about new blockings.
The following were blocked:
- A Russian-language article from the Estonian publication Postimees about the appearance of billboards in Moscow promoting voting against Putin. Roskomsvoboda notes that in March 2022, the Prosecutor General’s Office had already blocked the publication’s website completely.
- The website of the FBK campaign “Russia without Putin” - it was blocked for the third time, twice “by mask” and once without.
- The website of the American research organization RAND Corporation, which was included in the “undesirable” register in early December.
- The website “Domozhirov’s List”, which publishes information about residents of the Vologda region who died in the war with Ukraine.
All resources were blocked by an “unspecified government agency,” which most likely means the Prosecutor General’s Office.
- After the outbreak of a full-scale war in Ukraine, Roskomnadzor demanded that the media write about what was happening only with reference to official Russian sources. Journalists were also prohibited from calling the “Russian special operation” an attack, invasion, or declaration of war. Otherwise, the supervisory authority threatened with blocking and fines of up to five million rubles.
- For reasons of military censorship, Roskomnadzor blocked more than 200 thousand resources - deputy head of the department Vadim Subbotin spoke about this on June 9. According to him, this number also included “materials calling for mass unauthorized actions and riots.” “After the start of the ‘special military operation’, we strengthened our counteraction to the spread of calls for extremism and terrorism, mass unrest and ‘fake’ news on the Internet,” Prosecutor General Igor Krasnov previously stated in an interview with Kommersant.
- From January to June 2023, Yandex, at the request of Roskomnadzor, removed 190,525 links from the search. This is 41,161 more links than in the second half of 2022 . In addition, at the request of the supervisory authority, Yandex removes prohibited content from its servers, for example, from Yandex Cue or Yandex Music, as well as images, turbo pages, saved copies of pages, etc.