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Ask HN: Is Russian internet still being censored from the truth?

5 points by unicoded ↗ HN
With the recent speech Putin gave to the Russian General Assembly (2/21/2023), it makes me wonder how many people in Russia actually believe Putin's lies. This looks like an information war. Do Russian citizens have access to the truth?

10 comments

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r721
Here's a regularly updated list of blocked urls: https://github.com/zapret-info/z-i/blob/master/dump.csv (90 Mb)
LinuxBender
I see why you linked that one file. I am cloning the repo. It's 25% done and currently at 4.5GB. Thankyou for linking just that file.
r721
I think dump-00.csv - dump-19.csv are smaller chunks of this file for convenience or something.

This is unofficial btw - Roskomnadzor sends this file to internet service providers, and one of them decided to mirror it on Github as public service (secretly, of course).

LinuxBender
It's the .git folder (objects) that is massive. 15GB. I think that's the biggest git repo I've ever seen on github. 39207 commits going back to 2012. It should give some interesting history and insight into how they manage their censor list.
LinuxBender
Do Russian citizens have access to the truth?

Based on several different Russian youtubers I've watched the gist I get is that the older generations only watch television and read newspapers. Local social media is also state censored. They mostly believe what they are told. The zoomers either have VPN's or have friends that have VPN's and they get a bigger picture but are still afraid and reasonably so to talk about it in public.