MINSK. Sept 20 (Interfax) - Over 5,000 Internet resources have been branded extremist and restricted in Belarus since 2020, the year of the latest presidential election, Belarusian Information Minister Marat Markov said.
"As of September 1, 2024, the Information Ministry decided to restrict access to almost 14,000 Internet resources, more than 5,000 of which were designated extremist," the Belarusian state-run news agency BelTA quoted Markov as saying in Minsk on Friday.
"Notably, access to 400 resources was restricted between January 2015 and January 2020, while the number grew to 5,000 between January 1, 2020, and September 2024. These numbers do not prove how evil our Information Ministry is but demonstrate the colossal amounts of money that opponents spend on Belarus's information destabilization," he said.
The Belarusian presidential election of August 9, 2020, where Alexander Lukashenko, who had been in office since 1994, was declared the winner, led to over six months of protests against the election results. According to the Belarusian Central Elections Commission, Lukashenko gained 80.1% of the vote, and his main rival Svetlana Tikhanovskaya got 10.12%.
The opposition claimed the election results were rigged, and the protesters demanded Lukashenko's resignation, the release of political prisoners, and the scheduling of a new election.
After the election, Tikhanovskaya's supporters set up a coordination council, which called for a broad public dialogue, in particular, on the mechanism of a rerun presidential election. The Belarusian authorities designated the council unconstitutional.
The Belarusian State Security Committee added Tikhanovskaya to the list of entities and individuals involved in terrorism.