Pornhub implores US President Obama to pardon Edward Snowden and get him out of Russia

After the Kremlin's media and Internet watchdog Roskomnadzor decided to block leading pornographic website Pornhub on Wednesday, the adult content giant took to Twitter with a request the United States President Barack Obama pardon American whistleblower and former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, who has been exiled in Russia since June 2013.

This comes one day after leading human rights organizations such as The American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch urged Obama to forgive the whistleblower while the Western leader still has the chance to as president of the United States.

Edward Snowden is an American computer professional, former Central Intelligence Agency employee, and former government contractor, who leaked classified information from the US National Security Agency in 2013. Since June 2013, he has lived at an undisclosed location in Russia while seeking asylum elsewhere.

In an interview with British journalist Alan Rusbridger published by the Financial Times on Monday, September 15, 2016, Snowden established that his main priority was improving the situation in the United States.

“I can’t fix the human rights situation in Russia, and realistically my priority is to fix my own country first, because that’s the one to which I owe the greatest loyalty. But though the chances are it will make no difference, maybe it’ll help," Snowden said.

All Pornhub and YouPorn URLs were added to Russia's registry of illegal content on Wednesday, September 14, 2016. Roskomnadzor justified this decision by referencing a May 2016 ruling by a local court that had concluded that the websites violated Russia's ban on the dissemination of pornographic information and paraphernalia.

Though Russia's current laws do not forbid the consumption of pornographic content, such content is illegal to produce.

In April 2015, a court in Tatarstan ruled that all Internet pornography was illegal in the country, though major websites continued to work in Russia despite the ban.