Roskomnadzor, Russia’s mass media regulator, has restored access to a major Russian crypto news portal, Bits.media, whose representatives recently attended blocked as a result of proceedings in a regional court where they were not even summoned to attend.
Crypto news site Bits.media will once again be available to Russian readers once Roskomnadzor discontinues it
Bits.media, the second most widely read crypto-related news source in the Russian-speaking world, has succeeded in obtaining the revocation of its blacklist by the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media in Russia.
Roskomnadzor blocked access to the Bits.media website last week after adding an unspecified number of pages to its register of Internet sources disseminating information banned in the Russian Federation.
The action was based on a ruling by the Volzhsky District Court of Saratov in a lawsuit filed by the local prosecutor’s office in late March. The judge granted the prosecutor’s request less than a month after reviewing the case in the absence of the media outlet’s owner.
The URLs in question, some of which belonged to other websites, were not published; Bits.media discovered that one of them was the address of a crypto exchange aggregator. The page had to be removed, and subsequently media censorship allowed the Russian Internet provider to regain access to the website. The team believes that the other four links mentioned in the state court ruling are addresses of other aggregators or cryptocurrency exchanges.
The crypto media administrators intend to end the case, however, as they claim that the addresses were blocked contrary to the law. We consider the court’s decision illegal and seek its annulment,” said Ivan Tikhonov, founder of Bits.media. He noted that the editorial staff decided to deactivate the aggregator page so that other parts of the site would remain online during the proceedings.
In its future efforts to overturn the Saratov court ruling, Bits.media will be assisted by the Digital Rights Center, a Russian law firm that specializes in providing legal assistance to Internet users and businesses. two years ago, its lawyers had filed a complaint with Bestchange.ru achieved unblocking of aggregators.
The company’s legal experts were able to prove that the judicial authorities had committed a violation, since the circulation of cryptocurrencies was not and is not currently prohibited by current Russian law. is. the DRCalso has other successes, such as unblocking the Bitcoinfo.ru portal and the website of Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange.
Bits.media is not the only Russian-language crypto-related source that has been targeted recently: in early April, Roskomnadzor restricted access to Forklog.com, the leading provider of crypto news updates in the Russian-speaking world. Like media, this was done without prior warning or explanation.
The blacklisting of Forklog came just days after the online edition’s editors denounced Moscow’s “special military operation” in Ukraine, Bits.media noted in its report. according to Roskomnadzor, Forklog is a Russian distribution and remains blocked in Russia because it presents information that is forbidden to distribute.
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