The Russian blog watchdog is banning access to adult websites for violating the law prohibiting the distribution of pornography.
Russia's media watchdog, Roskomnadzor (or the Russian Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media) has blocked two popular adult websites, Pornhub and YouPorn, for internet users in Russia. The agency's duties include monitoring the internet and blocking sites if they are deemed to have violated Russian law.
Roskomnadzor blacklisted 11 pornography websites on Tuesday. All of Russia’s internet service providers (ISPs) have 24 hours to comply. According to Roskomnadzor, the reason for the decision was that the dissemination of such information is harmful to the development of children. The court also ruled that the website illegally produces and distributes pornography, a crime punishable by two to six years in prison. The agency did not specify why the courts ordered the adult sites to be blocked, but it repeated its advice from the last time it banned Pornhub in 2015. In September last year, Roskomnadzor had banned the Russian-language version of Pornhub after a court in the southwestern city of Krasnodar Krai ruled that the website violated child protection laws. The ban was announced on Tuesday following two separate court rulings – a court in Voronezh banned Pornhub and one in Vladivostok banned YouPorn.
The media watchdog's new decision has drawn a social media backlash of frustration from users. When a Russian Twitter user asked Roskomnadzor: "If you block Pornhub, could you offer an alternative?" The government watchdog's official Twitter response was: "as an alternative, you can meet someone in real life."
Russian fans of Pornhub contacted the site’s US Twitter account, asking if the adult service was aware that it had been banned in Russia. Pornhub issued the following response on Roskomnadzor’s website, in an attempt to gain traction: “If we offered you a Premium account on Pornhub, would you allow Pornhub in Russia again?” However, Roskomnadzor responded with a typically philosophical response: “We’re sorry, but we’re not in the market and demographics are not a commodity.” It also retweeted a post by another Russian user, who said he had followed the agency’s advice and was therefore planning to get married soon.
Russia’s mechanism for combating illegal content on the internet allows low-level courts to ban even very popular sites, sometimes leading to public outcry. In June, the organization briefly blocked access to Wikipedia after a court ruled that an article about hashish contained “prohibited information.”.
