I am one of the developers of the Censor Tracker add-on, which is listed on Mozilla’s add-on repository. We recently noticed that our add-on is now unavailable in Russia, despite being developed specifically to circumvent censorship in Russia.
We have not changed any visibility settings, nor have we received any emails regarding this action.
Our Russian users now see this message when they visit the page of Censor Tracker:
That page is not available in your region
The page you tried to access is not available in your region.
You may be able to find what you’re looking for in one of the available extensions or themes, or by asking for help on our community forums.
Can anyone suggest or explain what this is related to? Was there some request from the Russian authorities to make the extension unavailable in Russia or is there some other reason for this decision on Mozilla’s part?
I might also add that the extension pages are freely available in other regions, for example in the USA. This confirms the idea of regional blocks specifically in the RU region.
Could Mozilla’s blocking of add-ons result in Russian Firefox users facing the danger of torture and imprisonment? Or is this just an act of censorship on Mozilla’s part?
It’s not illegal to circumvent censorship in Russia. However propaganda of ways of bypassing censorship is punished by law. Running a Tor node is also illegal. So, no, Mozilla’s blocking of add-ons doesn’t result in helping Russian users to avoid torture or imprisonment.
P.S. I believe you meant not “facing” but “avoiding” the danger.
We are committed to an internet that includes all the peoples of the earth — where a person’s demographic characteristics do not determine their online access, opportunities, or quality of experience.
What a shame, Mozilla!
Will the official statement on this action be published?
Or will you continue to keep silent and pretend as if nothing had happened, as other corporations do, having lost all conscience?
It seems that Kommersant has received the reply from Mozilla, but not the extension developers.
“After recent regulatory changes in Russia, we began to receive persistent requests from Roskomnadzor demanding that we remove five extensions from the Mozilla extension store. After careful consideration, we have temporarily limited their availability in Russia. Realizing the consequences of these actions, we are carefully considering further steps, taking our local community into account,” Mozilla told Kommersant.
I’ve asked the reason in AMO Matrix chat room, no reply yet.
USE of tools is not prohibited. Advertising and propaganda of such tools IS prohibited. RKN is specifically authorized to prevent such advertising and propaganda, they usually do it by asking resources to stop hosting this information and by them if they don’t comply.
Yes, it’s bad, and it IS de-facto censorship(which is forbidden in Russia). Question is - h ow to handle this by keeping extensions active and avoid blocking.
Hello,
can i use Censor Tracker to circumvent censorship in Germany?
The government banned RT from here two years ago and only allows us to consume Ukrainian propaganda like Ghost of Kyiv stories.
I also would like to know how the Great Counteroffensive last year ended, any talk about this is under heavy censorship.
I’ll ignore your ironic tone and answer you. Initially, it was developed for Russia (since we have a publicly available list of banned websites), but anyone can use it since we support custom proxying lists. So, the answer is yes, you can use it everywhere, including Germany.
So i have to create custom lists in order to be able to consume media that my regime here censors, because my regime here doesn’t publish the list of banned websites, while Russia does?
Sounds useless, i will just keep using ordinary proxies. Thanks, though.
Well, as I said Censor Tracker is initially developed by Russian developers for Russian users (although we also managed to add support for Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakshstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan). It is not surprising that censorhip in Germany is not our priority.
Cool.
Well, if you would have advertised it in a general way, instead of specifically targeting a single country (as you wrote in OP), then this one country might have not been justified to ban it.
i.e. if i would make an Extension with the specific purpose to bypass the media bans in Germany, they would shut me down in Germany.
Already happened to others that did that.
