Russian Government Begins To Selectively Censor Their Internet

We’ve heard of countries such as China who are heavily censoring the internet, and it seems that Russia has joined in as well. According to a report by The New York Times, the Russian government has recently begun enforcing a new law which was introduced in November 2012 in which they will “block Internet content that it deems illegal or harmful to children”. Now before you get up all riled up about another country censoring the internet, it seems that Russia’s way around it does make sense and isn’t as extreme where an entire country is denied access to a certain website.

For example in Russia’s case, what they are doing is that they are asking companies to selectively block certain postings, so that “contentious material can be removed without resorting to a countrywide ban on, for example, Facebook or YouTube, which would reflect poorly on Russia’s image abroad and anger Internet users at home.” Seems fair, doesn’t it? However we guess that there will be some argument about how the internet shouldn’t be censored, even if only affects a certain number of users, but we guess that will be a debate for another day.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Web
Tags: government, internet