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Russia Blacklists LGBT Teen Online Support Group

A Russian web site that served as a support group for LGBT teenagers has been blacklisted by the authorities and will likely be blocked within the country, news reports said Monday.

The site's name Deti-404 (Children-404), after the online HTTP error message for "page not found," may prove portentous if Russia's Internet watchdog Roskomnadzor considers the site to be in violation of a federal law that regulates online content.

Russian news site Ura.ru reported on Monday, citing Roskomnadzor, that the Deti-404 web site will be blocked because it disseminated information on committing suicide.

Deti-404.com and as its eponymous groups on social networks Facebook and VKontakte were still accessible in Moscow at press time Monday evening.

Ura.ru published a post contained on Deti-404's Facebook page showing a young woman's scratched-up arm with the numbers "404" writing in black ink. The caption reads: "I want to die, to disappear, so that I simply never existed."

Deti-404's founder, Yelena Klimova, said last week that she was fined 50,000 rubles ($780) for violating Russia's controversial law against the "propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations among minors." The site's blacklisting may be linked to that case.

Roskomnadzor opened a case against Klimova last November after it claimed to have received some 150 complaints from "citizens and organizations" about Deti-404's pages on social media networks.

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