Russia Briefly Blocks Reddit Over a Mushroom-Growing Post

On 12 August 2015, Russia's communications regulator Roskomnadzor ordered internet service providers to block the entirety of Reddit. The trigger was a single user post containing instructions for growing Psilocybe (psilocybin) mushrooms, which fell foul of Russian laws prohibiting the dissemination of information about producing illegal drugs.

Roskomnadzor had publicly warned, including via a post on the Russian social network VKontakte, that it would block the whole site unless Reddit removed the offending content. Because the regulator initially struggled to reach Reddit, and because the post sat on an HTTPS connection that made selective blocking difficult, ISPs moved toward blocking the entire domain.

Reddit said it had not initially seen the regulator's notices, but once aware it restricted access to the specific post for users in Russia. Roskomnadzor confirmed compliance and removed Reddit from its registry of banned materials roughly a day after adding it, ending the block.

The episode illustrated both the breadth of Russia's drug-information censorship regime, under which tens of thousands of pages had already been blocked, and the leverage regulators could exert over global platforms by threatening site-wide blocks rather than targeting individual URLs.