Police in Kaliningrad charge an autistic man with hate speech for posting a sexist Internet meme

A year ago, police in Kaliningrad charged a local man with hate speech because of a sexist picture he shared online. The suspect, 27-year-old Artur Smirnov, has been diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, and his mother has spent the past 12 months lobbying the district attorney’s office to close the case against her son.

In 2014, Smirnov uploaded a picture of a man punching a woman in the face, captioned, “Unlike women, house pets never betray you.” The man shared the picture in a Vkontakte community called “Hatred for Women” that had “no more than three members.”

Police have allegedly pressured Smirnov to confess to the charges or risk pretrial detention. His mother says his health has deteriorated over the past year.

Is no one in Russia sick of prosecuting harmless online haters?

In mid-August Vkontakte’s parent company, Mail.ru Group, urged the government to decriminalize the sharing of harmless Internet content (including posts, reposts, “likes,” and comments), and also asked state officials to amnesty Internet users convicted of nonviolent crimes under Criminal Code articles 282 (extremist hate speech) and 148 (offending religious sensitivities).

A similar initiative has the support of Russian Human Rights Commissioner Tatyana Moskalkova, Russia’s Communications Ministry, and even the Russian Orthodox Church. This isn’t the first effort to repeal Article 282, however, and Vkontakte — despite its recent show of support for the decriminalization of online hate speech — makes these prosecutions possible by cooperating with Russian law enforcement.