The Wikimedia Foundation, owner of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, was fined by a Russian court on Thursday for failing to remove content deemed extremist as Moscow steps up a campaign to crack down on independent sources of information.
WikipediaWhich says it offers a “second draft of history”, one of the few surviving fact-checking sources of information in Russian since Moscow sent its armed forces into Ukraine in February 2022 as the crackdown intensified. Is.
The Tagansky District Court said it fined Wikimedia 800,000 RUB (about Rs 8 lakh). Russian news agencies in the courtroom said Wikimedia had been accused of failing to remove material related to a song by the alternative rock band Psychia or Psychite, which has been officially designated “extremist”.
The agencies said that Russia has fined Wikimedia about 9 million RUB (about Rs 90 lakh) in the last one year.
Wikimedia did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The foundation’s Russia chapter previously said it believed the other fines could be overturned, but that the number of cases against it could rise given the number of articles on Wikipedia about the conflict.
Russia has been seeking to launch a domestic online encyclopedia for years, without a concrete result.
And a Russian counterpart was “absolutely necessary,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Tuesday.
“It will contain really verified and accurate information, objective information,” he said, “because we know that Wikipedia has many distortions, many untruths, many historical, factual and other mistakes.”
Russian domestic tech companies, led by entities linked to or controlled by state-owned gas giant Gazprom, are sensing opportunities in Russia’s growing digital isolation as foreign internet firms are blocked or left Russia Is.
But while Moscow has restricted access Twitter and to meta platform flags Facebook And InstagramWikipedia remains freely available.
© Thomson Reuters 2023