Internet censorship in the Russian Federation is enforced on the basis of several laws, including the Russian Internet Restriction Bill and the federal law "On Protecting Children from Information Harmful to Their Health and Development".
Since 1 November 2012, Russia maintains a Federal blacklist maintained by the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media (Roskomnadzor). It is used for the censorship of individual URLs, domain names, and IP addresses. The blacklist regulations are outlined in a government decree issued on 26 October 2012.
The blacklist was originally introduced to block sites that contain materials advocating drug abuse and production, suicide, and child pornography. Later, the law was amended to allow the blockage of sites containing materials that advocate extremism or any other content subject to a gag order. These regulations have been frequently abused to block criticism of the federal government or local administration.
Russia was found to engage in selective Internet filtering in the political and social areas and no evidence of filtering was found in the conflict/security and Internet tools areas by the OpenNet Initiative in December 2010.
Russia was on Reporters Without Borders list of countries under surveillance from 2010 to 2013 and was moved to the Internet Enemies list in 2014.