Dozens in Russia imprisoned for social media likes, reposts

TVER, Russia (AP) — Anastasia Bubeyeva shows a screenshot on her computer of a picture of a toothpaste tube with the words: "Squeeze Russia out of yourself!" For sharing this picture on a social media site with his 12 friends, her husband was sentenced this month to more than two years in prison.

At least 54 people were sent to prison for hate speech last year, most of them for sharing and posting things online, which is almost five times as many as five years ago, according to the Moscow-based Sova group, which studies human rights, nationalism and xenophobia in Russia.

The vagueness of the phrasing and the scope of offenses that fall under the extremism clause allow for the prosecution of a wide range of people, from those who set up an extremist cell or display Nazi symbols to anyone who writes something online that could be deemed a danger to the state.

[...] it's up to the court to decide whether a social media post poses a danger to the nation or not.

After her husband was arrested, Anastasia Bubeyeva, 23, dropped out of medical school because she couldn't find affordable day care for her child, who still wears an eye patch for an injury he suffered when he bumped his head during the raid.

The program showed an anonymous blogger complaining about social media users who voiced their support for Ukrainian troops and were "ready to back a coup in Russia and take up arms and kill people as the Nazis did."

Alexander Verkhovsky, director of the Sova group, says roughly half of the convictions of hate speech online are about posts on VKontakte, which he said might be because its administration might be easier for the Russian police to deal with than that of foreign-owned social media.

Russia faced a surge of racially motivated attacks against Central Asian migrant workers in the 2000s, but the crime rates dropped drastically after dozens of neo-Nazis got lengthy prison sentences for extremism.

Rights activists and lawyers who have worked on extremism cases say the drop in violent hate crimes sent police and investigators scrambling to prosecute people for non-violent offenses to show a solid record of tackling extremism.