The courts began to ban sticker packs in the Telegram messenger

The courts declared 33 sets of sticker packs illegal

Courts in the Kirov region were the first in Russia to ban sticker packs in the Telegram messenger. By the beginning of March, they recognized 33 sets of stickers as prohibited in the country, Vorstka calculated based on court files.

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The prosecutor's office explains that the banned sticker packs promote extremism

The prosecutor's office filed applications to the courts. From the end of December 2023 to the beginning of March this year, five courts in the Kirov region considered 13 such applications. All demands of the prosecutor's office were fully satisfied.

In court, department employees argued that “as part of their supervisory activities,” they found sticker packs that contained “images of Nazi symbols and paraphernalia, as well as symbols and paraphernalia of banned extremist organizations.”

“The ‘stickers’ of Nazi ideology provided for use in messengers promote extremism on social networks,” the court decisions say.

Most of them are really related to nationalist themes - 14 banned sticker packs are dedicated to Adolf Hitler and memes with him, two to the Ku Klux Klan, two more to skinheads and one to the nationalist Artyom Bonov.

Along with Nazi symbols, the greeting “Glory to Ukraine!” was banned. Glory to the heroes!”

At the same time, nine sets of stickers are memes, some of which contain swastikas. For example, because of this, the YellowBoi sticker pack was banned - one of the stickers depicts a swastika on the character’s forehead. Other sticker packs are collections of memes that are not united by a common theme. In them, in particular, there are images of Alexei Panin, Leonid Volkov, Ramzan Kadyrov and Irina Yarovaya.

At the same time, one of the sticker packs with memes did not contain Nazi symbols, but it did contain an image of the flag and coat of arms of Ukraine, as well as the greeting “Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the heroes!”

Let us remind you that Vorstka previously reported that Telegram was fined 4 million rubles for refusing to remove posts about the Defenders of the Fatherland foundation, which is run by Putin’s niece Anna Tsivileva. We also wrote that Telegram agreed to label bloggers verified by Roskomnadzor .

Photo: One of the banned sticker packs for Telegram

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