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Censorship Government The Internet

Russia Proposes Banning Foul Language On the Internet 239

Posted by timothy from the nsa-and-uk-have-ruined-all-soviet-union-jokes dept.
eldavojohn writes "In a country where it's illegal to insult a government official, State Duma Deputy Yelena Mizulina has proposed an amendment to ban swearing on social networks, bulletin boards and all websites. The website would be blocked if the offending material had not been removed within 24 hours. The name of the law this would be added to? "On the protection of children from information harmful to their health and development." Mizulina's title in regards to this legislation? Chairwoman of the Committee on Family, Women and Children (No joke!). Of course, Yelena Mizulina is no stranger to unwarranted censorship as she was behind the law banning gay propaganda to minors and invoked laws to try to silence critics on twitter. The article also notes, 'United Russia deputy Vitaly Milonov put forward a similar initiative on 25 July. He proposed to tighten control over social networks and allow people to dating sites through their passports.'"
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Russia Proposes Banning Foul Language On the Internet More

Russia Proposes Banning Foul Language On the Internet

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  • Obligartory (Score:5, Funny)

    by ifranto ( 851514 ) on Tuesday July 30, 2013 @09:07AM (#44422771)
    In Soviet Russia, foul language bans you!

  • I can see the future of the internet. There will always be somebody in authority wanting to ban something.

    • Future? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by The MAZZTer ( 911996 ) <megazzt.gmail@com> on Tuesday July 30, 2013 @09:12AM (#44422853) Homepage
      How is that not the present?

      • And the past. The only question is how successful these people are.

        As you probably saw recently the UK will be getting a their own Great Wall type censorship soon...which you can opt out of. Great way to get the "troublemakers" to identify themselves, I bet the Chinese wish they'd thought of that first.

        • Hugely successful.
          After all, who doesn't love the rulers? they are so awesome, always care for our well being. Take Putin, he's is sooo gentle with his adversaries, to the point of giving up his positions. He's also a nice man. Not as sexy as His Honesty Berlusconi, who has to run away from hordes of horny chicks, but almost there.

          I wonder if this law will make any difference, since all we want to do is to praise the leaders who constantly succeed in making this planet the best possible place in the entire

        • And the past.

          Ever since the Neolithic Revolution screwed things up.

    • ... and claiming that they want to ban it in order to protect children. Because then it puts any opponents to the ban in the position of seeming to say, "I don't want to protect children."

      And I think what you'll find is that, in each case, the proposed ban is just a way to get a foot in the door, so that they can build more invasive systems for monitoring and filtering what we access in general.

      • Because then it puts any opponents to the ban in the position of seeming to say, "I don't want to protect children."

        Well, I'd just answer, "Why don't you protect your own children, instead of outsourcing your parental responsibilities to the rest of society?"

        "Charity begins in the home."

        • Well, I'd just answer, "Why don't you protect your own children, instead of outsourcing your parental responsibilities to the rest of society?"

          "So you don't want to protect the children?! You monster!"

      • That's the same old thing they do with the pro-choice/pro-life abortion campaigns. If you're not for pro-choice, you are against people having a choice, which is bad. If you are against the pro-life side, you are against life, which can be seen as equally bad. the pro-choice people would have a lot more trouble getting support if they called it pro-fetus-killling.

      • I think you are correct and I am all for freedom of speech. As for foul language I rarely use it and those that know me well know that when I do I mean serious business. That however is a personal choice.

    • I can see the future of the internet. There will always be somebody in authority wanting to ban something.

      It will also be nothing but teletubbies. Plus, you get an award for logging in.

  • "Well what the hell are we supposed to use? Harsh language?" ...aww crap....dang....errrm....!@#$%^&*(

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      Nope, simply swap to words with dual meanings which would be very difficult to ban ie fuck vs screw, dick vs cock, pussy vs cunt. Given enough time should they be serious enough, the use any words could be banned.

  • Fuck [bbc.co.uk] Why the capital 'F' I do not know.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by nickol ( 208154 )

      BBC - no. Just because the English word "fuck" has no meaning in Russian.
      But - this site is already banned in Russia

      http://ironscheme.net/

      Enjoy.

  • They DO live in Russia, after all. Come to think of it, that probably explains the drinking too.

  • its for the CHILDREN FOR GODS sakes!!!

  • When are people going to learn, democracy doesn't work. -HJS
  • Are they planning to make the Internet the only place in Russia that's free of cursing? Cursing is more endemic to Russia than drinking.

  • We russians don't curse - (Score:4, Informative)

    by Thor Ablestar ( 321949 ) on Tuesday July 30, 2013 @09:33AM (#44423131)

    - we just use bad words as ordinary speech (My russkie matom ne rugaemsya - my matom razgovarivaem).

    And all this curse-banning circus has the only purpose that isn't exposed: To promote Internet filters that will be (and are) used for any purpose THEY like. No wonder that I2P NetDB contains more Russian nodes than any other country's.

  • People/humans interpreting sound as "foul" are foul in their brain structure and need to clean up their neural wiring. Similar all that religious junk going around and what else have you.

  • State duma != Russia (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MrL0G1C ( 867445 ) on Tuesday July 30, 2013 @09:52AM (#44423403) Journal

    News sites should quit doing this, Russia is a land mass and can not ban anything, the asshats in the State Duma otoh might come up with crap like this.

    'USA thinks it should invade North Korea'

    See how that works, propagandist news style that is 99% lie.

  • Russia would shut down (Score:4, Funny)

    by Hoi Polloi ( 522990 ) on Tuesday July 30, 2013 @09:52AM (#44423405) Journal

    How would Russians communicate without cursing?

  • Lame Excuse to censor (Score:3)

    by sl4shd0rk ( 755837 ) on Tuesday July 30, 2013 @09:55AM (#44423435)

    "The website would be blocked if the offending material had not been removed within 24 hours. "

    Snowden better get his shit straight soon. He's not going to be able to reach anything but fuzzy kitten websites within a couple weeks and even then... one bad translation of "Pussy" and there goes lolcats.

  • Lame attempt to spice up the intro.
    It's the same in many countries, including many democracies such as France, India...

    Regardless of your constitutional rights, I suggest it's also a very bad idea in the US of A.

    That said, I have travelled and worked a lot in the USA and Russia, plus other more 'exotic' spots such as the Middle East, (including Israel), North Africa, Central and South America....
    Never had any problem with the police or other officials, at all...
    (Indeed, one time in the USA, the officer who

    • Regardless of your constitutional rights, I suggest it's also a very bad idea in the US of A.

      Written by someone who has never been to a town-hall meeting in the USA.

      Or witnessed the screaming invective thrown at both Bush and Obama.

      No, in the USA you don't get in trouble for insulting a government official - shooting him might get you jail time, insulting him...nah.

      • I've often thought it would be fun to have a contest based on insulting the US President. To make it interesting, it would only be open to people visiting the US.

        Contestants would stand outside the White House fence and publicly insult the president, loudly and with a sign, while videoing it. All videos would be posted to YouTube. Winner would be the one with the most views. Threats of violence would be disqualified.

        The contest would serve two purposes: a bit of fun and showing the world that, despite o

  • So, let's pretend for a moment that banning foul language isn't completely ridiculous, but a worthy goal from Russian government. There's still a practical problem... how?

    First of all, the censorsh... (oops, "child protection") department will need to monitor consistently all sites in the Russosphere, and maybe some in the Anglosphere. Some of those won't reside in Russian Federation, and RF's gov asking the responsible countries' govs for info about the criminal swearing scum will at least result in a "lol

    • Obviously there'll need to be some powerful advances in natural language processing. Once machines can determine the intent of words, then they will be able to appropriately block content.

  • Foul language, sex and violence - the new DRM! (Score:3)

    by itsdapead ( 734413 ) on Tuesday July 30, 2013 @10:02AM (#44423529)

    All this internet censorship of foul language, gratuitous sex and graphic violence (possibly all at the same time) is really just HBO's latest scheme to stop people torrenting Game of Thrones...

  • Committee name includes family, women, and children. Perhaps if their families included men the children wouldn't need the government to protect them.

    • Sorry but men that protect their childen are systematically incarcerated here. Especially if the criminals are from Chechnya (remember Tsarnaev).

  • You can just go Yelena your Mizulina, you filthy Vitaly Milonov.

  • Language is not constant (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Rakishi ( 759894 ) on Tuesday July 30, 2013 @10:11AM (#44423649)

    If you ban all curse words then people will simply invent new curse words and, most likely, words that you can't ban. Or words that if they ban them have hilarious side effects. Like, say, Putin.

    Go putin yourself. You're such a putin. Your mother is such a putin.

    • Just ask Rick Santorum ;)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by richlv ( 778496 )

      in latvian the surname of that stupid fucked up bitch sounds somewhat similar to "the one who pees".
      the ignorant censorship promoting always-peeing shithead :)

      fhew. i'm not used to throwing that many curse words in, i should practice. a target is available :>

    • Moral authoritarians [truth-out.org] never understand this. They have a different model of human nature that believes people need to be beaten into shape by threat of force.

  • This women can go and fuck herself. This is a excellent example what is happening in Russia, as this is nothing but censorship China style. Democracy is dead in Russia today, thanks to Putin and his evil minions.

    • She may not go and do a non-traditional sex, sex with a non-traditional partner or a sex in non-traditional position since her previous law proposal banned just it. At least her speech in Duma has been understood just so.

  • Fuck that. Fuck your censorship. Fuck YOU.

    The entire world doesn't need to be made safe for children.

    Shit piss fuck cunt cocksucker motherfucker and tits.

    • You forgot to insult their worthless sack of shit dumb-ass motherfucking government officials. But we're good now with this thread.

  • I for one welcome all such draconian laws, just moves the revolution that much closer, if they do get carried away.
    yayy ammo

  • First, stop daddy from chugging vodka and beating the wife and kids in a drunken stupor. I'm sure that does a lot more damage than the occasional What-The-Fuck.

    • Daddy drinking vodka and beating the wife and kids has a better chance to vote politically correctly. You understand. The sober daddy loving his relatives makes too much damage with his ballot.

  • Ivan's problem isn't Ivan, but i don't see boat loads of people trying to live and work in russia. Could it be that there are people just as smart as Ivan? Could Ivan be the second coming? Or are people bascially smart enough so as to go on with their dreams, and have no problem ignoring Ivan?
  • This is the slippery slope that I mentioned earlier in a post about the UK censorship of websites deemed to have "adult" content. First, it starts with websites that have "adult" content, then the censorship goes into many other types including bad words, anti-government or subversive content, anti-semitism content, political opponents speech, etc. Then it gets to a point where it will serach and replace on bad content and change it to good content or remove just the posts themselves so no one can see the

  • This law is enacted nominally to protect the kids from foul language? What about us poor adults? 99% of the time I read or hear somebody egregiously misusing foul language, the author or speaker is underage. Ever go on XBox Live? Yeah. Tweets? Blogs? It's the same. That's not to say their elders don't drop a few cuss words here and there but by and far, in my experience, it's the younger set that are abusing those words. And I'm fairly certain they didn't learn those words from the Internet.

    So Russia, pleas

  • A solitary figure in 10 Downing Street wonders why he didn't think of this?

    For the children! For the women! For decency! For Czar Putin!

  • Curse Word Definitions (Score:3)

    by Jason Levine ( 196982 ) on Tuesday July 30, 2013 @12:47PM (#44426017) Homepage

    I don't curse. Ever. (Yes, I know I'm a freak of nature.) However, even *I* see this as a horrible thing. Why if people curse it's their responsibility. I'm also the parent of young kids and the fact that people curse online is the least of my concerns when my kids go online. (Higher up on the list are people who would try to scam them or harm them in some way.)

    Once Russia bans curse words, I predict a rise in "alternative" curse words. Instead of saying "the F word", they could say Frell. Instead of "the S word", they could say Scrap. Kind of like how the producers of MASH weren't allowed to use the word "virgin" in one episode so, in their next episode, they had someone say he was from the "Virgin Islands." People will rebel and find ways around the system. Then either the system will need to expand to include all possible words that could be used as curse words (pretty much the entire dictionary) or it will become so ineffective as to be useless for its intended purpose.

  • Poshel na hui! Idi ebyai svou mat!

  • A classic poster (Score:4, Interesting)

    by 21mhz ( 443080 ) on Tuesday July 30, 2013 @02:29PM (#44427391) Journal

    An oldie, yet very apropos [artlebedev.com], from Artemy Lebedev of the OLED keyboard fame.

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