MOSCOW – Russian censors on Tuesday blacklisted MindGeek website Brazzers.com, the third adult site the country has ordered ISPs to block in six months. The other two — PornHub.com and YouPorn.com, both “disappeared” by media watchdog Roskomnadzor in September 2016 — also belong to MindGeek.
The conclusion is inescapable: Russia is picking on the world’s largest porn company.
A statement from Roskomnadzor attributed the blacklisting to Brazzers content’s “deeply negative influence on the human psyche.” (Porn will have to become much more disturbing to outdo the deeply negative influence on the human psyche exerted by the weird bromance going on between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.)
According to The Moscow Times, the block order took a somewhat circuitous route from prosecutors “working in the interests of the Russian Federation” through an October decision by Bolsheglushitsky District Court in Russia’s Samara region before landing in Roskomnadzor’s inbox.
The Times hinted at one possible reason for censors’ sudden interest in the streaming virtual porn theater: Too many Russians are visiting Brazzers. SimilarWeb notes Russian users compose only 4 percent of Brazzers’ traffic, but Russian-language search terms driving that traffic doubled in the past year. The social media numbers are even more impressive: VKontakte, Russia’s version of Facebook, sends 11 percent of the site’s social media traffic — far behind YouTube and Facebook (41 percent and 29 percent, respectively), but ahead of Twitter (10 percent) and Reddit (4 percent).
Like everyone else with an internet connection (including the U.S. President), Russian porn fans took to Twitter to voice their displeasure. The outcry has risen nowhere near the level of the epic social media battle that erupted when the news about PornHub’s blacklisting became public, but the proudly horny in Russia are making their opinions known. Some chide Roskomnadzor for unwarranted censorship of a product the Russian people want, others lament being forced to watch Russian television now that their favorite online entertainment venue is off-limits, and still others get right in Roskomnadzor’s face and ask for referrals to other adult websites.
It has yet to be seen whether Brazzers will respond to the ban with the same kind of ransom offer MindGeek made Russian censors for PornHub — essentially, “release the hostage and we’ll give you two weeks’ premium access for free.” (Roskomnadzor declined.) Brazzers’ only response so far took the form of a cheeky tweet:
Disappointed to hear that on such cold winter nights the good citizens of Russia have been denied the warm embrace of Brazzers entertainment
— Brazzers (@Brazzers) February 7, 2017
On the bright side, hours after Roskomnadzor announced the Brazzers ban, the agency unblocked YouPorn.
Мы исключили страницу сайта youporn из Реестра в связи с получением определения об отмене решения суда г. Владивостока.
— Роскомнадзор (@roscomnadzor) February 7, 2017
(For those who don’t read Russian: “We excluded youporn page of the site from the Register in connection with obtaining a determination to cancel the decision of the court in Vladivostok.”)
