Russia Uses New Internet Censorship Bill To Silence Prominent Reporters Who Criticized The Government
from the for-the-children! dept
Last summer, Russia passed an internet blacklist bill which required ISPs to censor certain sites. At the time, of course, Russian officials insisted it would be used to "protect the children" from "harmful information," including child porn, suicide instructions, and pro-drug propaganda. They insisted it would not go beyond that. Of course, within weeks, a popular blogging site, LiveJournal, was censored, followed by the Russian equivalent of Wikipedia.And now they're targeting journalists as well. Access is reporting that added to the blacklist has been a site used by prominent free speech / civil liberties reporters in Russia who have been critical of the government. The government claims (of course) that they put the site on the blacklist due to "child pornography elements," but Access points out that rather than just removing such content, they've blocked access to the entire site, which is notable given the usage by critical reporters.
At least two prominent journalists host their blogs on LJRossia.org: Andrei Malgin, a journalist who has been very critical of the government and hosts a mirror site at LJR, and Vladimir Pribylovsky, who has been targeted for publishing a large database of government misdeeds and for disclosing official documents that expose corruption.Once you've set up tools that enable censorship, you know they'll eventually be used for censorship.
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Filed Under: censorship, critics, free speech, internet, russia
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btw, are/were there any real democracies?
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Thin Skin Government
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Article is nothing but FUD. As usual.
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You seem to be confused about intentional and accidental censoring. For instance Dajaz1 was censored accidentally (and the US failed to fix it when it was thrown in their face). Regardless of what kind of censorship goes on the simple fact that the tools can cause censorship should serve as deterrent to putting such tools in place.
Also, Wikipedia is not a good example here ;)
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Very, very different. The content is illegal and the government can go after and shut down the actual content. They cannot and do not have a blacklist blocking access. In fact, when they tried that, it lost in court.
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Not suprising
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