Russia threatens to ban a gay website for promoting non-traditional relationships

Russian government claimed the LGBT site gay.ru damages the health of minors, and it must remove information on the site within 24 hours. If it fails to comply, the government will block access to the site.

Established in 1997, gay.ru is one of Russia’s oldest LGBT websites and quickly became major LGBT resource thanks to daily updates. It features more than 30,000 articles and documents in Russian and 500 in English. It is visited by more than three million visitors yearly or over 50,000 hits a day, including weekends.

Russia’s federal censor added the website to its Internet blacklist for spreading so-called “gay propaganda”, banning the site in accordance with a court order. The court reached its ruling despite the website's warning to readers that its content is intended exclusively for adults.

In a letter to the site, the government said: “the information posted on the site is classified as prohibited information directed to distribution among minors capable cause them to interest in non-traditional sexual relations, distortion of the notion of social equivalence of traditional and non-traditional sexual relations and the emergence of the desire to do non-traditional sexual relations, that is a real threat to their health.”

A new step against LGBT rights by Russian government.

In 2015, Russia sued Apple for including same-sex couples Emoji