Russia — A court in Komsomolsk-on-Amur, Russia has blocked access to YouTube after the website was accused of hosting “Russia for Russians,” which was judged to be an extremist propaganda.
Along with YouTube, four other web sites for “immoderate” content in a judgment that promises to raise new worries about free speech. Russia’s anti-extremism laws have been criticized for being used to stifle freedom of expression.
The Internet is widely acknowledged as the last uncensored media in Russia, and the ruling pushes the country toward the likes of Iran and Pakistan, which have blocked YouTube.
The court’s decision also governs the Internet Archive and three online libraries, Lib.rus.ec, Thelib.ru and Zhurnal.ru, all of which were found to host writings by Adolf Hitler.
The other sites were banned for posting excerpts of Adolf Hitler’s book “Mein Kampf,” which was excluded by the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office in March after it was found in violation of laws against extremism.
The decision came after a video entitled “Russia for Russians,” a Russian extremist slogan, was allegedly posted on the video sharing site.
Apart from the above sites, the court also ordered the internet provider RA RTS Rosnet to block access to videos by President Dmitry Medvedev. The provider says it has appealed the July 16 ruling.
The Komsomolsk-on-Amur City Court said Rosnet, a Khabarovsk region Internet provider, must block three online libraries: Lib.rus.ec, Thelib.ru and Zhurnal.ru, as well as YouTube.com and Web.archive.org, which stores archived copies of old and deleted web pages.
With this decision, Russian authorities join a long list of governments that have blocked access to YouTube at some point or another, including China, Brazil, Indonesia, Iran, Morocco, Pakistan, Tunisia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates. YouTube material has also been censored in the U.S. and U.K.
Once added to a list of extremist materials, a book or video can only be withdrawn by another court ruling. The list, first published in July 2007, has since swelled from an initial 14 items to 686.
Judge Anna Aizenberg passed her verdict on YouTube on July 16, but the decision was only made public on Wednesday, when Rosnet filed an appeal.
The provider said it has proposed several ways to filter the illegal content without blocking access to the entire web sites, but the court has ignored all alternatives.
“Not a single one of our employees supports or condones extremism,” Rosnet said in a statement that also pointed out inconsistencies in the ruling.
Generally, these bans are initiated because the videos on the popular hosting site exhibits something a government would rather its citizens not see, from state police brutality at a protest to unflattering depictions of its leadership to “immoral” or sexual content.
YouTube’s parent company, Google, criticized the ruling as unconstitutional. “In our opinion, the court’s decision … to limit access of Rosnet users to the entire YouTube.com site, not to a particular video, breaches the right for freedom of information, guaranteed by Article 29 of Russia’s Constitution,” Google spokeswoman Alla Zabrovskaya said in an e-mailed statement.
YouTube can remove illegal videos after a simple request is submitted to its moderator, she added.
The company is not going to appeal but will follow the case, Zabrovskaya said.
The proprietor of Rosnet, the ISP affected by today’s decision, is Aleksandr Ermakov. He spoke to media today, saying essentially that the court had thrown the baby out with the bathwater.
“All of mankind is using this website. And providers like ours do not violate Russian law. But we are still being forced to close the website so that our users can not log on and watch the videos. This is absurd! According to this logic, we have to demolish all buildings that have swastikas on the walls. Or when two people are discussing a bomb over the phone, we have to take away the phones from all people across Russia.”
Russia’s courts have banned other websites in the past, but this is the first time that a prominent foreign site such as YouTube has come under fire.