Russia Threatens Reddit Ban Over Weed Tips

Blocking the entire site would seem to be a rather drastic response to a few threads containing information that Russian Federation would rather its citizens didn’t have access to.

Russia’s Roskomnadzor, or “Federal Service for Supervision in the Sphere of Telecom, Information Technologies and Mass Communications”, wrote the on the domestic social network VKontakte about the situation, including the image below in the post.

The Russian government has said it’s considering a nation-wide block on the social website Reddit over concerns about easily accessible information on growing and acquiring drugs.

The post doesn’t actually specify which thread had particularly caused a problem, but finding advice on how to grow drugs isn’t hard to come by on Reddit. The note said that due to Reddit’s lack of response, Roskomnadzor was “preparing” to place the site on its registry of banned sites, which it threatened would automatically make Reddit inaccessible on some servers because of “technical features”.

“If anyone has contacts with the Reddit administration, ask them to check their email for letters from Roskomnadzor, otherwise, due to technological features, many operators may block the whole site”, the post said, according to a rough English translation. Wikipedia was blacklisted in 2013 for together with an evidence on “Hashish Smoking”, and a lot of web sites criticizing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have additionally been blocked, probably the most outstanding belonging to Vladimir Putin critics Alexei Navalny and Garry Kasparov, the chess champion. The warning coincides with on the Pirate Bay, anonymity providers and comparable threats. GitHub, a website belonging to the Jehovah’s Witnesses church and the Internet Wayback machine have all also been blocked.