Human rights organisation releases report on Internet censorship in Russia

Russian human rights organisation Agora has published a report entitled ‘The Triumph of Censorship’ (in Russian). Using media reports, official statements and data about prosecutions of people for the content they posted online, the report sketches an image of censorship in Russia. Censored content included calls to join unsanctioned rallies, as well as child pornography and information about how to make illegal drugs. Furthermore, the number of people sentenced to prison terms has ‘multiplied’. According to one of the human rights lawyers who wrote the report, the goal of censorship is more to discourage people from accessing the Internet than to control everything that is available online; ‘The goal is to have most people give up and go back to watching television, which is overwhelmingly state-controlled.’