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A Russian court on Thursday imposed fines on Apple and the host of Wikipedia for failing to remove material deemed to be false information about Russia's military actions in Ukraine. A justice of the peace in a magistrate's court, which handles administrative violations and low-level criminal cases, fined the Wikimedia Foundation 3 million rubles (USD 33,000) for retaining material on Russian-language Wikipedia pages that violated a law against discrediting Russia's military and spreading false information about the Ukraine conflict, the Interfax news agency reported. The same justice found Apple guilty of failing to delete podcasts and apps with such information and fined the company 400,000 rubles (UAD 4,400). Since sending troops into Ukraine in February 2022, Russia has enacted an array of measures to punish any criticism or questioning of the military campaign. Some critics have received severe punishments. Opposition figure Vladimir Kara-Murza was sentenced this year to 25 ye
A Moscow court on Thursday again fined Wikipedia for a Russian-language article it refused to remove about Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the latest in a series of government moves to silence objective reporting or criticism of the war and restrict the Russian public's access to information. The court fined Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that runs the free, publicly-edited online encyclopedia, 2 million rubles ($24,464) for not removing a Wikipedia article titled Russian occupation of the Zaporizhzhia region," a reference to one of four Ukrainian provinces that Russia annexed last September. Most countries have condemned the annexation, as well as that by Russia in 2014 of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula, as illegal. The state Tass news agency said the Wikimedia Foundation had failed to heed the demands of Russia's state communications watchdog Roskomnadzor to remove articles containing false information. Tass said a Wikipedia representative asked the court to reject the removal ...