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Russian Wikipedia Shutters In Protest of Internet Blacklist Plans

Posted by Unknown on from the sarah-palin-to-liberate-russian-people dept.

decora writes "If you visit Russian Wikipedia today you will be forgiven for thinking the entire site has crashed. It is not a crash, but a protest of the Russian State Duma's Bill 89417-6 According to Ria Novosti, the bill is 'proposing a unified digital blacklist of all websites containing pornography, drug ads and promoting suicide or extremist ideas.' Russian Wikipedia's main page has been replaced with a redacted logo and a protest text, part of which says 'The Wikipedia community protests against censorship, dangerous to free knowledge, open to all mankind. We ask you to support us in opposing this bill.' (translation by Google Translate)"

2 of 84 comments (clear)

  1. Good luck by siddesu · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The Russian Internet has been under a very strong pressure to shut up from the political elite for a long time now (I got banned from a forum for the first time for criticizing Hutin in 2004 or thereabouts), but this law is like opening the proverbial floodgate of abuse.

    Good luck fighting back. Democracy is a process, not a state -- unless the people are prepared to stand up for it, it goes.

    In passing, hardly anyone would think the site has crashed -- those who use it often will read the notice, and those who don't will only go there because they've seen the news of the protest.

    1. Re:Good luck by siddesu · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Not really, hence the emphasis on the first time I recall it happening. The removal of even mildly anti-government stuff began in the early 2000s, but it didn't end there. Later on quite a few sites in the .ru TLD were told first to remove anti-government discussions and news, then raided, then finally forced to move away from the runet altogether.

      There are reports that on many occasions the FSB (Federal Security Service) has requested that ISPs and sites provide information on users. Things have gotten particularly bad since the mass protests during the 2010 winter and then around the elections in 2011 and this year.

      It is not only the Internet, all media are being targeted. The editors of one of the leading newspapers, the Kommersant (critical of Putin), were sacked (by the owners, who are very close to Pu) because of the way they covered the elections in 2011, the independent radio Echo of Moscow saw some editorial changes, etc. etc.

      Russia is descending back to something that looks a lot like the socialism of the Brezhnev era (or stabilitism, as people joke these days, playing word games with Putin's constant calls for "stability").