After blocking a Wikipedia article for less than than 18 hours, the Russian media watchdog Roskomnadzor removed it from a list of banned webpages this past Tuesday.
At the end of July, a local court in the southern Astrakhan region declared that a Wikipedia article on charas — a form of hashish — violated the Russian law that forbids dissemination of information on how to make, buy or use drugs. Last week, Roskomnadzor warned Wikipedia that unless the article be amended and the forbidden content removed, it would have to block the entire online encyclopedia due to its use of a secure communications protocol, which does not allow censors to block webpages selectively. A few days later Roskonadzor issued another warning, saying that it seemed “the website’s administrators want to be blocked.”
This past Monday the agency declared that it had ordered Internet providers to block the article’s webpage. The move provoked outrage among the Internet community that claimed the Russian government was prepared to block a popular international website, used by many ordinary Russians on a regular basis.
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