Mar 132008
 

Well, I guess that’s cutting to the chase. Here in the U.S. some of us have been worrying about how hate crime laws could eventually be used to shut down dissenting political views.

Now we see that Russia is making a Great Leap Forward. No messing around with “eventually”. A blogger is being charged with hate crimes for making a post critical of the government.

Link: Blogger Charged in Russia

And it’s interesting that Putin wants to regulate bloggers who get more than 1000 readers a day, treating them the same as newspapers. Keep in mind the extremely high death rate among journalists who were critical of the government, and you can see that Putin hs painted a bullseye on his country’s bloggers.

And by asserting control over those who get more than 1000 readers a day, he’s effectively asserting control over the small ones, too. Small ones will have to jump through govt hopes in an attempt to convince the govt that they are too small to submit to censorship. That in itself will induce plenty of self-censorship.