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Duolingo sent a letter to Russian media regulator Roskomnadzor, the watchdog confirmed in a statement, saying it had “removed all materials promoting non-traditional sexual relationships”, Russia state-cobtrolled Tass reported.
The decision came after Roskomnadzor confirmed it would check Duolingo for “LGBT propaganda” in February after a request from Radetel, a self-described “traditional values” advocacy group that found “same-sex dialogue” in the app’s lessons.
Following Radetel’s request, the head of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy, Alexander Khinshtein, threatened to block Duolingo in Russia, adding that Duolingo should “immediately deal with this unpleasant problem”.
Duolingo’s removal of LGBT content is only the latest example of Russia’s continued censorship of the LGBT community, prompted by legislation providing for fines of up to 4 million rubles for disseminating so-called “LGBT propaganda”.
In November 2023, Russia’s Supreme Court ruled that the “international LGBT movement” qualified as an “extremist organisation”, effectively banning it and making pro-LGBT activity punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
What does "platform in Russia" mean? Is it some kind of dedicated site?
Most multinational web apps will have different deployments for different countries.
Locating the servers geographically closer to the users reduces latencies and costs.
Running different deployments allow them to tailor more closely to local regulations, without having it impact everyone else
So the content people get on the site is based on their IP? It sounds unfair for me. Anyways, Doulingo is useless for me since they removed discussion completely. I suggest people to boycott Duolingo due to their homophobic decision.
Not really based on a user's IP.
Based on BGP peer routing, so it's actually physical location of users/ISP/trunks etc, and how they connect to the rest of the world networks.
The geographically local data center can announce a shorter route for a specific IP (block) than a data center on the other side of the planet, so the packets get routed to it