Russia Passes Internet Censorship Legislation Impacting LiveJournal Blog

August 26, 2012

Internet censorship is a hot topic these days due to the fact that some countries do not value freedom of speech and choose to restrict it. ZeroPaid recently reported on this issue in the article “Russia Censors LiveJournal.”

According to the article, Russia has passed internet censorship legislation in the name of protecting its citizens from suicide, drug use, and other criminal activity. The impetus for censoring LiveJournal,  a social network owned by SUP Media where Internet users can keep a blog, occurred on July 18 when:

“Local law enforcement informed a Yaroslavl court about pat-index, a neo-Nazi blog it had found on LiveJournal during a sweep. The blog’s hateful message violates Russian federal laws against extremism. Because of Bill 89417-6, the court now has the power to stamp it out completely and immediately. The court ordered Internet provider Netis Telekom to block, among other illegal sites, this blog’s IP. The court order shows the IP to be blocked as 208.93.0.128.

However, LiveJournal blogs don’t have unique IP addresses. That IP belongs to all of LiveJournal Russia, effectively blacking out LiveJournal for everyone in Yaroslavl (a city of nearly 600,000) and all the surrounding areas to which Netis Telekom provides service.”

Despite the fact that the censorship only occurred for a short period of time, the fact that legislation restricting Internet rights, which have been deemed part of freedom of speech by the United Nations, exists is very problematic.

Jasmine Ashton, August 26, 2012

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext

Comments

One Response to “Russia Passes Internet Censorship Legislation Impacting LiveJournal Blog”

  1. The Wicked Witches of Cyberspace « To Inform is to Influence on August 30th, 2012 11:39 am

    […] Russia Passes Internet Censorship Legislation Impacting LiveJournal Blog (arnoldit.com) […]

  • Archives

  • Recent Posts

  • Meta