The website of the journalistic project “Aspects - Bashkortostan” was blocked in Russia. The journalists themselves reported this in a telegram.
The RKN service for checking access restrictions confirms the blocking information. What caused it is not yet known, since the editors did not receive any notifications from government agencies.
“Aspects” was created in April 2022 by Ufa journalists from the liquidated radio station “Echo of Moscow”. Among the events of the republic that the publication covers, there are persecutions within the framework of the “Baymak case” and data on the deaths of residents of Bashkortostan participating in the war against Ukraine.
On March 29, the Aspects-Bashkortostan page was also blocked on Odnoklassniki, the publication reported on its Telegram channel. Access to the social network page is limited at the request of the Prosecutor General's Office. The day before, “Aspects” were blocked on VKontakte and Yandex.Zen
- The journalists emphasized that they have always “fundamentally complied with” the legislation and therefore consider the blocking “arbitrary.” 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.