Russia bans Reddit because a thread gave advice on how to grow psilocybe mushrooms
Russia bans Reddit over shrooms — The Russian government has officially banned Reddit, one of the most popular sites on the internet. — Unless Russian users take advantage of VPN to bypass the website blocks …
Context & Ripple Effects
Russia's block of Reddit lasted barely a day: after Reddit deleted the offending mushroom-cultivation thread, Russian censors pulled the site from their banned-sites registry, as covered in the follow-up report on the removal from the registry. The episode showed how little provocation a single user post needed to trip a national blacklist.
It also foreshadowed a longer arc between the two parties — by 2022 Reddit was itself quarantining r/Russia and r/RussiaPolitics over unsourced information and banning Russian state media links site-wide, while Moscow had moved from blocking sites to ordering VPN providers like NordVPN and ExpressVPN to enforce its blacklist.
First-order effects
- Russian users immediately lose access to Reddit unless they route around the block with a VPN, per the article's own caveat.
- Reddit faces a direct choice between deleting a single user thread and losing an entire national audience — it chose deletion, which ended the ban within days.
Second-order effects
- The block pushes Russian traffic toward VPN services, the same providers Moscow would later try to conscript as enforcers by ordering them to block blacklisted sites themselves.
- Platforms operating in Russia learn that any user post can become a compliance event, incentivizing proactive takedowns rather than waiting for regulator action.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, content moderation becomes bidirectional geopolitics: states punish platforms for individual posts while platforms later police state-linked accounts and media, as Reddit did against Russian influence operations and state outlets in 2019 and 2022.
- Enforcement migrates from blocking websites at the border to regulating the circumvention tools themselves — control of VPNs, not just site lists, becomes the lever.
The trend: National internet censorship is escalating from reactive site blocks over single posts to systemic pressure on VPNs and reciprocal platform-versus-state moderation conflicts.