The Kremlin seems is really going out of its way to doctor and edit the information that is made available to its people.

Most recently, reports reveal that Russia has started working its scissors on Wikipedia. Allegedly the Roskomnadzor, the nation's censorship agency has ordered that one page about charas (hashish) from the encyclopediac website be taken down. If you're in Russia this page could most likely be blocked. Even after taking requisite action -- the internet providers fulfilled the conditions of the authorities by tinkering with the URL of the specific page -- it seems like the agency is not satisfied, and threatened to take the entire website off Russia's radar, if Wikipedia doesn't do something about that specific page.

Here's the official announcement made by the agency:

"In the event that [Wikipedia] refuses to comply with the court's ruling. Roskomnadzor will block the webpage on Russian territory using the registry of illegal information. In this case, insofar as Wikipedia has decided to function on the basis of https, which doesn't allow restricting access to individual pages on its site, the entire website would be blocked."  

This comes on the heels of another ridiculous instance of an online forum being banned and for similar reasons. Reddit has been briefly banned in Russia over a contentious post about easy ways of growing hallucinogenic mushrooms.

The Federal Drug Control Service decided to take action against the social media website taking issue with the content of a certain post titled, "Minimal and Reliable Methods for Growing Psilocybe [Mushrooms]."

Meduza reported that the Russian censor authorities did try to get in touch with the Reddit admin to look into the page, but that they were not reachable. Here's the -- slightly sardonic -- public statement the censors gave out: "We assume that the website is simply understaffed during the summer holidays, but this is no excuse to risk [losing] its entire audience [in Russia]."

Tags: russia Wikipedia