Recently it has been reported that Russia has joined the band wagon of countries to block Internet content that it deems illegal or harmful to children.
The Russian government has requested many social networking and entertainment sites including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to remove certain contents. Video sharing website YouTube has been requested to remove some particular videos which the Russian government or authority thinks is illegal, harmful to children or leads to suicidal case or promote suicide. Interestingly, Facebook and Twitter have already agreed to remove those things that are illegal or harmful to children, but YouTube is against the decision.
According to YouTube it has some videos like ‘how to make fake wounds with some make up materials’ or ‘how to make fake-realistic gunshot wounds‘ or ‘how to make a fake razor blade‘ or something like those, but those videos are only for entertainment purpose. Besides YouTube has mentioned that it earns huge revenues through those videos and hence those videos can’t be removed from the website. More interesting thing is YouTube officials have filed a lawsuit regarding this matter in a Russian court in February.
On the other side, the government officials of that country have mentioned that “child protection law” enables the country to just “ban individual content” on such “social networking sites which prove to be harmful for the children,” instead of banning the whole service.
Now it’s time to see how this case ends. Stay tuned.
Source: NYT
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