Ukraine Banned Its Biggest Social Network Over Fears of Russian Influence

This is an automatic summary, original reduced by 59%.

Ukraine is blacklisting the country's most popular social network VKontakte, email provider Mail.Ru and a host of other companies-all because they're Russian businesses.

Tanya Cooper, an analyst at Human Rights Watch, told Motherboard the official aim is to prevent Russian companies from profiting in Ukraine and taking money out of the country, but also to "Protect the country from Russian propaganda [and] to protect the sovereignty of the country."

Blocking Ukrainians' access to the social network vKontakte and other sites raises concerns of censorship, and puts Ukraine and Poroshenko in the same club as Turkey and China.

The Ukraine Crisis Media Centre cited the founder of an anti-propaganda television show StopFake as saying the move was "The greatest contribution to the protection of information sovereignty of Ukraine ever", while one media expert was cited as saying that though the threat was real, the decree wasn't the right response.

BBC World Journalist Patrick Jackson noted that "If I want Russian propaganda about East Ukraine or Crimea, I can find it on Facebook as easily as vKontakte."

The security company has repeatedly had to defend itself against accusations of Russian meddling, though it's repeatedly worked with Interpol and Europol to target Russian criminals.

Summary Source | FAQ | Theory | Feedback | Top keywords: Ukraine^#1 Russian^#2 country^#3 VKontakte^#4 Ukrainian^#5

Post found in /r/censorship, /r/worldpolitics, /r/FreeSpeech and /r/1984isreality.

NOTICE: This thread is for discussing the submission topic. Please do not discuss the concept of the autotldr bot here.