Roskomnadzor, which is in charge of regulating the media in Russia, has given people access to a major Russian website for crypto news. Bits.media was recently shut down because of a case in a local court where the company’s representatives were not even told to show up.
Roskomnadzor has taken Bits.media off its list, so Russians can read it again.
Bits.media, which has the second-largest audience for crypto-related news in the Russian-speaking world, was put on a blacklist by Russia’s Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology, and Mass Media. However, it was able to get off the list.
Roskomnadzor, which is another name for the agency, blocked access to the Bits.media website last week after adding an unknown number of pages to a list of websites that spread information that is illegal in the Russian Federation.
The measure was put in place after the Volzhsky District Court of the city of Saratov ruled on a case brought by the office of the local prosecutor in late March. After thinking about the case without the owners of the media outlet, the judge agreed to the prosecutor’s request less than a month later.
Some of the problematic URLs belong to other sites, and they were not made public. Bits.media found that one of them is the address of its aggregator for crypto exchangers. It had to take that page down, and then the media censor gave Russian internet providers permission to let people back on the site. Its team thinks that the four other links mentioned in the provincial court’s decision are the addresses of other aggregators or cryptocurrency exchangers.
The crypto media’s management, on the other hand, wants to end the case because it believes the address was blocked illegally. Bits.media’s founder, Ivan Tikhonov, said, “We think the court’s decision is wrong and will try to get it overturned.” He said that the site’s editors had decided to turn off the aggregator page so that the rest of the site would still be available during the proceedings.
Bits.media will get help from Digital Rights Center, a Russian law firm that helps internet users and businesses with legal issues. Together, they will try to get the Saratov court’s decision overturned. Two years ago, its lawyers got the Bestchange.ru aggregator to stop being blocked.
The company’s legal experts were able to show that the courts had broken the law because the circulation of cryptocurrencies was not and still isn’t against the law in Russia. The DRC has won other cases, such as getting the websites of Bitcoininfo.ru and Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world, unblocked.
Bits.media is not the only Russian-language source of information about crypto that has been attacked recently. Early in April, Roskomnadzor blocked access to Forklog.com, which was the best place for Russian speakers to get crypto news updates. Just like with Bits.media, this happened without any warning or explanation.
Bits.media says in its report that Forklog was blacklisted just days after the online edition’s editors criticized Moscow’s “special military operation” in Ukraine. Roskomnadzor says that Forklog is still blocked in Russia because it gives out information that is illegal to share in Russia.
