The Russian Prosecutor General’s Office denied sending a request to media watchdog Roskomnadzor asking for the Telegram domain to be blocked.
Citing the agency’s press service, on Saturday, October 29, the Russian state-owned news agency TASS reported the Prosecutor General’s Office as insisting that it did not send a request to block the Telegram t.me domain. “The Prosecutor General’s Office of Russia did not send a request to block the t.me domain”, the message allegedly said.
Earlier in the day, it had been reported that Russian media watchdog Roskomnadzor (RKN) restricted access to the t.me domain, which belongs to Telegram. This was done at the request of the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office they claimed.
The specified domain is used to create short links to publications in the Telegram messenger. Due to access restrictions, they will stop working, but the original posts will still open in the application itself.
Such measures by RKN are explained by the violation of Article 15.3 of the Law ‘On Information’. This regulates access to unreliable data and information which is deemed to incite users to participate in extremism, riots, or any unauthorized actions.
Previously, the t.me domain disappeared from the register of domain names sown as blocked on the website of the Unified Registry, which includes page indexes of sites on the internet and network addresses, as reported by gazeta.ru.
