Russian Internet censorship: A journey into the belly of the Kremlin’s media watchdog

This summer, for a short while, pages on Reddit and Wikipedia were technically banned in Russia. While the ban targeted only individual pages of these popular websites, roughly a third of Russian Internet providers lacked the tools necessary to block specific content within a site built on the https protocol. As a result the entire Reddit and Wikipedia became inaccessible to several millions of Russian Internet users. Authorities from Roskomnadzor, the telecom regulator, finally removed these pages from its Internet blacklist, saying the administrators of these sites finally agreed to change or block the banned content.

What do these attempts to ban some of the Internet’s most popular destinations mean? Will the Russian authorities try it again? Opposition-minded online publication Meduza has examined how Russia’s biggest censorship agency works.