MOSCOW, May 7 (RIA Novosti) – Russia’s telecoms watchdog Roskomnadzor has again included a Russian-language Wikipedia article on cannabis smoking in a blacklist of prohibited websites, Roskomnadzor representative Vladimir Pikov said on Tuesday.
“The decision [to put the article back on the blacklist] has been made because the current text differs from the revised variant and is basically a return to the original article that was banned in the first place,” Pikov said.
The telecoms regulator warned Russian Wikipedia in early April that it was blacklisting the article, which contained information about ways of smoking cannabis. The website’s management decided to edit the article rather than delete it.
Experts from Roskomnadzor and drug control regulators approved the new wording of the article and removed it from the blacklist.
Stanislav Kozlovsky, the acting director of Wikimedia.ru that manages the Russian Wikipedia, confirmed in his Twitter blog on Tuesday that the article on cannabis smoking had been blacklisted again.
Russia adopted a new law last year allowing extrajudicial blacklisting of web content deemed to be promoting suicide, child pornography or drug use.
Websites hosting such information may be closed without recourse to the courts. Russia’s blacklist of websites, monitored by Roskomnadzor, was approved on November 1, 2012.
According to the rules, the management of a site has three days after being notified to delete or amend prohibited information. If they fail to do so, telecoms operators may block access to the site in Russia.
Last July, the Russian-language division of Wikipedia temporarily suspended its work in protest against the blacklisting law, which was at that time a bill proposing a unified digital blacklist of all websites containing banned content.
