After essentially dismantling  independent TV news distribution in Russia, President Vladimir Putin has taken further steps in his government’s assault on freedom of expression in that country. President Putin has now signed a law banning all swearing in films, television broadcasts, theaters and the media. Books will need to carry warnings on the cover, organizations and individual offenders will face fines and merchants who fail to warn consumers about swearing in videos will risk having their licenses withdrawn. 

In the meantime, on Wednesday BuzzFeed reporter Rosie Gray exposed that a senior Russian diplomat at the Russian embassy in Washington made sexist statements about Pussy Riot in 2012 emails, suggesting that the all-female protest group “just need a good fuck.” Sexism, hypocrisy and authoritarian regimes, that’s some ménage à trois.

Also reported in The New York Times this week, Putin quietly tightened the reins on online free expression with the new “Bloggers Law”:

Russia has taken another major step toward restricting its once freewheeling Internet, as President Vladimir V. Putin quietly signed a new law requiring popular online voices to register with the government, a measure that lawyers, Internet pioneers and political activists said Tuesday would give the government a much wider ability to track who said what online.

Widely known as the “bloggers law,” the new Russian measure specifies that any site with more than 3,000 visitors daily will be considered a media outlet akin to a newspaper and be responsible for the accuracy of the information published.

Besides registering, bloggers can no longer remain anonymous online, and organizations that provide platforms for their work such as search engines, social networks and other forums must maintain computer records on Russian soil of everything posted over the previous six months.

“This law will cut the number of critical voices and opposition voices on the Internet,” said Galina Arapova, director of the Mass Media Defense Center and an expert on Russian media law. “The whole package seems quite restrictive and might affect harshly those who disseminate critical information about the state, about authorities, about public figures.”

Freedom of expression is fully under siege in Russia, of this there is no doubt. How the new censorship laws will be applied to international sites such as Facebook and Twitter remains to be seen.