East Europe Censorship News

Tajikistan has enacted a ban on the distribution of the video games Counter-Strike and Grand Theft Auto (GTA), citing concerns about the games containing violent and immoral content.

The country's interior ministry announced that police in the capital, Dushanbe, will conduct raids and inspections of computer gaming centers suspected of selling these games. The ministry said,

Young people and teenagers who regularly play these games come under their negative influence and commit various crimes.

The ministry urged parents to monitor their children's activities and discourage them from playing games that promote killing, theft, and violence.

Authorities in Russia's republic of Chechnya have imposed limits on music tempos to abide by strict cultural norms in the Muslim-majority region.

From now on all musical, vocal and choreographic works should correspond to a tempo of 80 to 116 beats per minute, Chechnya's Culture Ministry said in a statement earlier this week.

The new tempo standard, which is relatively slow in the context of popular music, was announced following Chechen Culture Minister Musa Dadayev's meeting with local state and municipal artists.

Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov had instructed Dadayev to make Chechen music conform to the Chechen mentality, according to the statement.

Local artists were ordered to rewrite their music by June 1 to accommodate the changes. Otherwise, they would not be allowed for public performance, the Culture Ministry wrote on the messaging app Telegram.

Members of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's party have introduced a bill to criminalize the spread of information deemed false on the internet and through social media that violates Ukraine's national security.

Ostensibly, the bill is targeted at bot accounts coordinated by Russian special services who, as the authors of the bill claim, are conducting informational influence actions against the state interests of Ukraine. But in reality, the language of the bill is so encompassing that anyone could be arrested for posting information that the right-wing nationalist government in Kiev deems misinformation.

Under the proposed bill, lawmakers would have broad powers to arrest anyone who participates in the creation, acquisition, use or sale of accounts, including those containing knowingly false information, as well as the posting and distribution of inaccurate information.

Anyone who spreads so called misinformation with the intention to damage to the sovereignty, territorial integrity and inviolability, defense capability, national, state, economic or informational security of Ukraine, or to exert influence on decision-making or taking or not taking actions by state bodies or local self-government bodies, officials of these bodies, would likewise face arrest and imprisonment of 5 to 7 years and the confiscation of personal property.

The dictatorship in Turkmenistan does not get a lot of media and scholarly attention, although it is more than worthy of it. In the 2023 Freedom in the World Index, the country ranked in the bottom three, behind only war-torn Syria and ahead of North Korea. The issue of internet censorship is particularly acute in Turkmenistan. In 2016, the media freedom organization Reporters without Borders listed the country as one of the enemies of the internet due to its heavy censorship and information control policies. The internet speed in Turkmenistan is the slowest in the world. The authorities arrest citizens who use VPN apps to access censored content.

Between 2021 and 2022, a team of computer scientists conducted the first and only large-scale research on internet censorship in Turkmenistan, in which they tested 15.5 million domains for censorship and found out that over 122,000 domains are blocked.

Full research results are available here .