Tumasov said the country’s internet regulator had tried repeatedly to shut down his group’s website under the terms of Russia’s 2013 “anti-gay propaganda” law, which bans the dissemination of LGBTQ+ information to children.
So far, his organisation – the Russian LGBT Network – has been able to challenge the shutdowns in the courts. “Somehow we succeeded,” Tumasov said. “So our website is still up and our social profiles are still up.
But not everyone is so successful,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone. According to a major global report published this week by three rights organisations, 32 different LGBTQ+ websites were blocked at least once on Russian internet providers between mid-2016 and mid-2020. “News websites on