Twitter of a well-known hacker in Russia. Despite promises that the company will not go after accounts deemed to belong to extremists in the country, the @b0ltai account is no longer available to Russian users.
The account is used to regularly publish government leaks, sensitive documents, as well as other information about the Russian government.
It seems that the data published here is no longer a problem for the Russian government, as Twitter has decided to comply with its request to block the account. So all the data is hidden from Russian Twitter users who can now only see the usual blocking message when trying to find content.
According to the request received by Twitter and subsequently transferred to the Chilling Effects archive, the account contains “information prohibited for public circulation in the Russian Federation.” Twitter risked being blocked entirely in Russia if it did not comply with the request.
Users in Russia can still access the account by changing the global settings to a different country, which is quite easy and only requires a few minutes of fiddling with the menu.
Furthermore, the hacker decided to fight back and created a similar account simply called b0ltai2, which has not been blocked and will require additional legal action and court order. While the original account had over 7,600 followers, the second one has managed to attract more than 1,750 in less than a day.
This is just another example of how the Russian government is trying to control access to information, even via the Internet. Russian officials have recently said that Twitter has agreed to block about ten accounts. So far, the measures have only been applied to this specific account.
