Russian censors to inspect video game ‘World of Tanks’
The state agency Roskomnadzor, tasked with monitoring and censoring the media, has launched an investigation of the team-based online video game World of Tanks.
According to Roskomnadzor's official Facebook page, the agency received a complaint from a Russian citizen about the game. “According to the individual who filed the complaint, one of the threads in the forum contains information about methods of committing suicide,” says the agency's statement on Facebook.
Publishing methods of committing suicide and reasons for committed suicides has been banned by Russian law and websites that do not comply with this ban run the risk of being blocked.
Roskomnadzor has received an appeal to enter one of the forum pages of the multiplayer online game World of Tanks into the unified registry of prohibited information.
- Since 2012, the Russian government has been legally authorized to demand the removal of information deemed to “propagate suicide.” The law states that it is prohibited to publish calls to suicide and descriptions of suicide methods. Roskomnadzor is tasked with inspecting content and banning website and online services that fail to comply.
- HTTPS protocol presents technical challenges to Internet service providers, putting an entire domain at risk of being banned, if just one page on that website is blacklisted. For this reason, the entire Internet Archive was banned in Russia for containing links to Syrian islamist videos on one of its forums.
- In August, Roskomnadzor briefly banned the popular website Reddit. In September, Roskomnadzor banned access to 11 adult websites.
- For more on Internet censorship in Russia and how it works, read This is how Russian Internet censorship works: A journey into the belly of the beast that is the Kremlin’s media watchdog