Reddit Blocked in Indonesia and Russia Over Content Disputes
2014–2015
Indonesia blocked Reddit in 2014 over nudity, and Russia's Roskomnadzor blocked the entire site in August 2015 over a single post explaining how to grow psilocybin mushrooms, illustrating how individual content disputes triggered nationwide bans.
What happened
Two national governments blocked Reddit in the mid-2010s over discrete content disputes. Since 2014, Reddit has been blocked in Indonesia by the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology for hosting content containing nudity, part of the country's broader filtering of sites carrying pornographic material.
In Russia, the Federal Drug Control Service determined in August 2015 that Reddit was facilitating discussion of psychedelic drugs. On August 12, 2015, the media regulator Roskomnadzor blocked the entire Reddit domain, citing a user-posted guide on growing Psilocybe ('magic') mushrooms; the regulator had previously asked Reddit to remove drug-related posts without success. The whole-site block over a single page drew international attention as a disproportionate response. Reddit complied by blocking Russian users' access to the specific offending post, and the regulator lifted the nationwide block the following day.
The two episodes demonstrated how a single piece of user-generated content — nudity in one case, a drug-cultivation guide in the other — could expose the entire platform to nationwide censorship, and how Reddit's compliance choices varied by jurisdiction.
Impact
Demonstrated Reddit's exposure to nationwide blocking over individual posts and forced the company into reactive, jurisdiction-specific content-removal decisions to restore access.