From 5 to 11 December in Russia, according to experts from Roskomsvoboda, about 15,000 Internet resources were blocked, writes Kommersant. As the newspaper notes, a significant proportion of the requests for extrajudicial blocking falls on the department, whose name is not disclosed, but according to human rights activists, we are talking about the Prosecutor General's Office.
During this year, 1.5-7 thousand resources were blocked per week, on average – 4.9 thousand. The current surge could have happened for formal reasons, Karen Ghazaryan, director general of the Internet Research Institute, believes: “The end of the year is approaching, it is time for reports.” According to him, access to sites is often blocked, which no one would pay attention to without the fact of blocking: “The logic of blocking does not always correspond to the proportionality of threats.”
As Kommersant notes, the last time such a peak in the number of blocks occurred in April 2021 against the backdrop of protests in support of Alexei Navalny: then over 18 thousand sites and pages were blocked in the week from April 19, 2021. At the same time, previous peaks of blocking were accompanied by the same massive exclusions of sites from the registry, but this time only about 300 pages have been excluded so far.