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 with instructions for growing Psilocybe (psilocybin) mushrooms — pages roughly two years old — which fell foul of Russian laws prohibiting dissemination of information about producing illegal drugs. Russia's Federal Drug Control Service flagged the thread, titled "Minimal and Reliable Methods for Growing Psilocybe [Mushrooms]," and Roskomnadzor added Reddit to the national blacklist at the drug agency's behest. Earlier the same week, the regulator had threatened to ban Reddit over discussions about growing marijuana.

The escalation played out publicly on the Russian social network VKontakte, where Roskomnadzor said it had sent information about the ban to "multiple addresses" at Reddit but received no response. Its post warned: "Those who have contacts with the [Reddit] administration — ask them to check their email for messages from Roskomnadzor, otherwise… a number of operators may block the entire site." Because the post sat on an HTTPS connection, selective blocking was difficult: Meduza reported that roughly a third of Russian internet providers lacked the tools necessary to block specific content within an HTTPS site, so the whole domain became inaccessible to several million users depending on their provider.

Reddit, once aware, restricted access to the offending post for users in Russia. On 13 August, Roskomnadzor announced that federal officials had received a message on their "hot line" from the site's administrators saying Russian users no longer had access to the illegal content, confirmed full compliance and removed Reddit from the registry of illegal online materials. A Reddit spokesperson said: "We want to ensure our services are available to users everywhere but if we receive a valid request from an authorized entity, we reserve the right to restrict content in a particular country." The user behind the guide, u/rsocfan, surfaced to answer questions about how he single-handedly got Reddit banned in Russia and refused to delete it, writing: "Will I remove this post? No. I also think that Reddit administration needs to do nothing. This is important issue on freedom of speech, and only RKN want to violate it."

The episode fit an established pattern of Russian pressure on foreign platforms. In 2013, Roskomnadzor blacklisted Wikipedia in its entirety over a single article on "Cannabis smoking," and Google, Facebook and Twitter had all received stern reminders from the regulator about complying with Russian data-handover laws. Under Russia's drug-information censorship regime, tens of thousands of pages had already been blocked.

Years later the dynamic inverted. On 1 March 2022, days into Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Reddit itself quarantined r/Russia to minimize misinformation, removing the subreddit from search, recommendations and non-subscription feeds and interposing a warning that the community "contains a high volume of information not supported by credible sources." Coverage reported the subreddit mostly contained posts justifying or supporting the invasion.