Russian legislation allows for blocking any website

Russia’s communications watchdog Roskomnadzor has sufficient legal leverage to block any website or social network, but the question of blocking Facebook, Twitter or Google this year is not on the agenda, the chief of Roskomnadzor’s press-service, Vadim Ampelonsky, told the Kommersant FM radio station in an interview.

"From the legal point of view it is possible (to block Facebook in Russia). The same is true of Wikipedia and any other Internet site. There is the legal leverage for this," he said.

Ampelonsky said that the question of blocking social networks would certainly not be brought up this year. The schedule of 2015 checks of how the law on personal data was being complied with had been authorized already and Facebook, Twitter and Google were absent from it.

Roskomnadzor on August 20 warned Wikipedia it might be blocked for publishing an article about drugs. The watchdog had received a resolution from a district court in the Astrakhan Region on June 25, 2015 demanding a ban on spreading in Russia the information about narcotic drugs found in an entry of the Russian language version of Wikipedia. The warning was dispatched to the resource’s administrators.

Earlier, the director of the non-commercial partnership Wikipedia RU, Vladimir Medeiko said the watchdog’s decision to block access to the Wikipedia page containing information about narcotics would affect the whole resource.