A lot is illegal when you’re a mass media outlet in Russia. You can’t talk about the ways people kill themselves, you can’t disseminate extremist materials, you can’t promote illegal drug use, and so on. To enforce all these prohibitions, Moscow has a special state enterprise that reports to Roskomnadzor: the Main Radio Frequency Center “GRChTs” federal state unitary enterprise. The outfit employs hundreds of people to scan the Internet every day, analyzing hundreds of websites with pornography, obscenities, and other illegal content, which is flagged by a special automated system that also monitors the country’s print media. Meduza takes a closer look at this facet of Russia’s online censorship and speaks to some of the people directly engaged in this work.

On August 22, 2017, Republic chief editor Maxim Kashulinsky got a messageinforming him that his publication was being cited for breaking the law. Routine government monitoring of the outlet’s website, it turned out, had turned up an embedded YouTube video of a rap battle between “Oxxxymiron” and “Slava KPSS” that contained obscene language.

The notification meticulously documented exactly which forbidden phrases the rappers used in their battle and when. Admittedly, the censors didn’t make it very far into their analysis of the contest: the report sent to Kashulinsky focused entirely on obscenities uttered in the first five minutes of the YouTube video, before any actual rapping even began.

“The first phrase that put the monitoring service on alert [sounded like] ‘We’re getting fucking registered!’” Kashulinsky explained on Facebook in August (the “registration” referred to an account at Tinkoff Bank, which sponsored the event). “In full accordance with this appeal, there was a document with screenshots drawn up and an attached (1) DVD copy of the battle. The document and the DVD were put into a clear plastic folder [by GRChTs] and sent to Roskomnadzor.” The regulatory agency then formally registered the infraction and notified Kashulinsky.