The online service Ridero asked the writer Masha Pushkina to be removed from her book “Bipolar. No Masks” is an excerpt that tells about the girl of the artist Sasha Skochilenko, who was arrested in the case of military “fakes”. Pushkina told the Agency about this.
Ridero sent the writer an email saying she needs to edit the «content» if she wants the book to be featured on the platform. The representative of the service clarified that we are talking about specific quotes by Skochilenko: “Now I live with my girlfriend Sonya. <…> Homophobia has finished us off <…> I also dream of marrying Sonya and honeymooning in Amsterdam.”
Pushkina called Ridero’s actions “pure self-censorship.” The writer said that the publishing house «Peter», to which she transferred the rights to the printed version of the book, does not recall the circulation from stores. In addition, there are other references to LGBT relationships in the work, but «Ridero dug up this passage and asks for it to be removed.»
In December, online publisher Ridero announced it was testing its library using a neural network to identify LGBT books and remove them from sale. Later it turned out that the neural network was trained using the Toloka service owned by Yandex, whose users were asked to read the text and indicate whether it approved of the “existence of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgenders”, gender reassignment, bestiality, necrophilia, childfree ideas or incest. The press service of Yandex reported that they had withdrawn this task, considering it offensive.
According to the Agency, after the repressive law banning LGBT propaganda among Russians of all ages, Ridero also sent letters to the authors Xenia Nichelman, Konstantin Kropotkin Lena Klimova with a request to edit the books.
“How can I edit if my three books are exclusively about queer people, this is queer prose as it is. There is simply no room for discussion here,” Kropotkin said. Klimova told The Agency that the service eventually removed five of her books, and she removed the sixth herself. Ridero explains his requests by saying that he «warns the authors and makes sure that they do not unknowingly commit offenses.»