This Thursday was a dark day in the annals of Russian Internet history. After an all-too-brief interval of online purity and virtue, the pornographic video-sharing website Pornhub suddenly became accessible again to Web users in Russia, where it was banned by law enforcement seven months ago.
Without any formal word from government censors, Internet users around the country reported on Thursday that they could once again reach Pornhub from Russian-based Web servers, despite a court ruling that banned the site nationwide.
Pornhub ended up on Russia's Internet blacklist last September, after a court in the provincial Russian city of Voronezh ruled that it “illegally distributes pornographic material.”
Judge Vladimir Panasenko later told the news site Meduza that he “scarcely remembered” the case, which took place in May 2016.
According to Alexa Internet, Inc., which provides commercial web traffic data, Pornhub.com was the 40th most popular website in Russia in 2015, outranking major news media outlets like Ekho Moskvy, Vesti.ru, and Gazeta.ru.
