Twitter tries to avoid total blockade in Russia by locally censoring an account

Jul 29, 2014 09:05 GMT  ·  By

Twitter has decided to block the account of a prominent hacker in Russia. Despite promises that the company wouldn’t go against accounts considered to belong to extremists in the country, @b0ltai is no longer available for Russian users.

The account is used to regularly post government leaks, sensitive documents, and other information that the Russian government finds uncomfortable.

Well, it seems that now the data posted here is no longer an issue for the Russian government, as Twitter decided to comply with its request to block it. At the very least, all data is now hidden to the eyes of Russian Twitter users who can now see the common local censorship message when trying to view the content.

According to the request received by Twitter and later pushed to the Chilling Effects archive, the account contains “information prohibited for public distribution in the Russian Federation.” Twitter risked to be completely blocked in Russia if it did not comply with the limited censorship demand.

Users in Russia can still access the account by switching their global settings to a different country, which is a fairly easy thing to do and only requires a few minutes of tinkering with the menu.

Furthermore, the hacker has decided to fight back too and created a mirror account simply dubbed b0ltai2, which is not blocked and would require an additional lawsuit and court order. While the original account has over 7,600 followers, the second one has managed to attract more than 1,750 in less than a day.

This is just another example of how the Russian government tries to control access to information, even over the Internet. Russian officials have recently said that Twitter has agreed to block about ten accounts. So far, measures have only been taken against this particular account.

Furthermore, the word “agreed” is a bit too much under the circumstances, considering that Twitter pretty much has to comply with court orders. The fact that the Russian government also made sure to threaten Twitter with a full blockade surely helped to convince the company to comply with the order, sacrificing access to one account for the sake of millions of users.

Pressing Twitter into compliance has become a habit in several countries around the world, including Turkey and Russia, where the company has been threatened with total blackout unless some accounts became hidden for local users. The epidemic seems to have no end and it will likely continue to spread as more governments try to obtain control over the Internet.