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"In a lawsuit, the public prosecution office of Almaty, Kazakhstan has demanded from Google, Facebook, Twitter, and blogging platform LiveJournal, which is particularly popular among Russian-speaking bloggers, to stop publishing content from opposition media,\u00A0Novosti-Kazakhstan\u00A0reports.\r\n\r\nIn other words, prosecutors want Google and others to shut down pages, groups, and/or blogs that have been recognized by their office as \u201Cdirected at inflaming social hatred.\u201D\r\n\r\nTogether with major Internet companies, defendants in this case are several Kazakh opposition media outlets and their websites.\r\n\r\n\u201CGoogle is a defendant. I don't know if they know about it, but they are on trial, and they have to present their response to this lawsuit,\u201D the lawyer of opposition newspaper \u201CRespublika\u201D said during a press conference, Interfax reports.\r\n\r\nThe lawsuit filed by Kazakh prosecutors is related\u00A0to the recently completed trial of one of the country\u2019s opposition leaders, Vladimir Kozlov, during which several media outlets, including \u201CRespublika,\u201D have been declared as extremist.\r\n\r\nKazakhstan's government is infamous for \u00A0fighting freedom of speech in the Internet. In 2009, all chat rooms, blogs, and public forums were recognized as mass media, so any individual could face accusations of extremism and further prosecution\u00A0for expressing their opinion online.\r\n\r\nUpdate:\u00A0The General Prosecutor's Office of Kazakhstan has denied that Google, Facebook, Twitter and LiveJournal are defendants in this lawsuit, saying they are only mentioned in relation to certain pages and blogs. At the same time, prosecutors still may have questions for the Internet companies. \u201CIf the court decides, for instance, to ban \u201CRespublika\u201D newspaper, we will raise a question of deleting its page by Facebook administration,\u201D the office's representative told\u00A0Bnews.\r\n\r\nImage credit:\u00A0Phil Roeder / Flickr."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/11/23/kazakh-prosecutors-sued-google-facebook-twitter-and-livejournal/>