User access to Patreon, Grammarly blocked in Russia over fakes on special operation - Roskomnadzor

MOSCOW. Aug 8 (Interfax) - Russia's telecoms watchdog Roskomnadzor has restricted user access to the site pages of the platforms Patreon and Grammarly at the demand of the Russian Prosecutor General's Office over the spread of false information on the special operation on the territory of Ukraine.

"User access to the resources was restricted at the demand of the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation. User access was restricted over the spread of false information on the special military operation conducted by the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation on the territory of Ukraine," Roskomnadzor told Interfax.

Information on the blocking of the services was reported earlier. The universal service of Roskomnadzor for checking the blocking of pages and sites contains information on restriction of user access to pages of the sites patreon.com and grammarly.com at the demand of the Prosecutor General's Office of April 4 and April 15, respectively. As the sites use the network protocol https, the blocking of one page makes them fully inaccessible on the territory of Russia.

Some 138,000 sites with false publicly significant information on the Russian special military operation on the territory of Ukraine have been deleted or blocked in Russia, Russian Prosecutor General Igor Krasnov said in an interview with Kommersant.

Patreon is a crowdfunding platform where authors can disseminate their work by paid subscription or provide additional content to their subscribers. It was founded by musician Jack Conte and developer Sam Yam in 2013 and is based in San Francisco. It is popular among YouTube bloggers, cartoon painters, writers, podcast authors, and musicians.

Grammarly is an online platform using artificial intelligence to help people write text in English. It was founded in Kyiv in 2009. Grammarly also has offices in San Fransisco, New York and Vancouver. The service earlier suspended its operation on the territory of Russia and Belarus over the situation in Ukraine.