Roskomnadzor demanded that several media outlets remove publications about a link between yesterday’s banking outages and blocking measures by the censorship agency. The satirical public page “Dvach” was the first to report this the day before.
According to Roskomnadzor, the channel’s material is “aimed at destabilizing the socio-political situation in the Russian Federation.”
“Ostorozhno, novosti” found that similar posts had also disappeared from numerous public channels specializing in news rewrites: the posts were removed from the channels “Bekdor,” “Novosti Moskvy,” “Pryamoy efir,” “Moskvach,” “Moskva segodnya,” and others.
Earlier, it was reported that Forbes and Mash deleted materials in which the banking disruption was linked to Roskomnadzor’s blocking measures. Forbes wrote that TSPU (blocking equipment) cannot cope with “a multitude of blocking rules and crash under load.” Mash said the outage may have been caused by “blocking of IP addresses used in banking infrastructure operations.”
Those articles became the sources cited by other news outlets. At the same time, the editorial teams did not comment on the removal of the materials.
At the end of March, Roskomnadzor had already demanded that “Ostorozhno, novosti” delete a report saying that the agency was failing to cope with blocking measures. That post retold a Forbes article. The outlet complied with the censorship agency’s demand under threat of being blocked.