The Russian government says it will block Reddit, the so-called front page of the Internet, if the social news website does not remove a single thread that teaches users how to cultivate drug-producing plants.
Roskomnadzor, Russia's government agency that controls the media, wrote on its official VKontakte social media page that it asked Reddit administrators to remove the thread but said it did not receive a response.
Roskomnadzor said it was acting in accordance with a request from the Federal Drug Control Service of Russia but didn't specify which of the numerous drug-related Reddit threads caused the problem, according to Vocativ.
While Reddit recently banned a number of communities encouraging hate speech and abuse, the site's administrators indicated that drug-related content will not be banned.
Due to Reddit's lack of response, Roskomnadzor said it was "preparing" to place the site on its registry of banned sites, which would automatically make the site inaccessible on some servers due to "technical features," according to the VKontakte post.
"If anyone has contacts with the Reddit administration, ask them to check their email for letters from Roskomnadzor, otherwise, due to technological features, many operators may block the whole site," the post said, according to a rough English translation.
Russian authorities said the Roskomnadzor federal blacklist also includes sites that advocate suicide, drug use, contain child pornography, extremist content or content subject to a gag order.
Wikipedia was targeted in 2013 for including an explanation on "Cannabis Smoking," and various sites critical of Russia's involvement in eastern Ukraine have also been blocked, including ones belonging to President Vladimir Putin critics Alexei Navalny and chess champ Garry Kasparov, reports The International Business Times.
Russia has also blocked GitHub, an open source coding site; a website belonging to the Jehovah's Witnesses church; and the Internet Wayback machine. The country recently said it is considering blocking the web anonymizing service Tor, but experts don't believe that would be possible, according to Vice.
