A Russian court on Tuesday sentenced the parent company of the online participatory encyclopedia Wikipedia to pay a fine for two articles on the offensive against Ukraine, which Moscow deemed misleading.
According to Russian news agencies, the Wikimedia Foundation will have to pay a fine of 2 million rubles (about 30,000 euros/dollars) for failing to remove those articles which contained, according to the court, “false information“.
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The head of the Wikimedia UK association, which supports the Wikimedia Foundation’s projects in Russia, confirmed that the sentence was due to “two articles related to the events in Ukraine.”
“No one will remove” the two pages in question and the court ruling “will be appealed to justice”Vladimir Medeiko told AFP.
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The sanction is an example of the repression exerted by the Russian authorities against the entities and individuals they accuse of publishing “false information” about the military intervention in Ukraine. This is the third fine imposed on the Wikimedia Foundation in Russia since the conflict began.
The main foreign social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, were blocked and the American giant Google was sentenced in July to pay 360 million euros for not having suppressed some content that criticized the offensive in Ukraine and that had been published on YouTube. The Internet is one of the last spaces for free expression in Russia, but the authorities have increased the pressure on the network in recent years, and even more so since the campaign in Ukraine began.
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In 2015, Moscow briefly placed Wikipedia on the list of sites to be blocked for an article about charas, a variety of cannabis.
Russian law prohibits posting information about drug use online. In 2019, President Vladimir Putin called for a Russian alternative to Wikipedia.
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AFP
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