“Yandex” blocked the issue of Putin’s photo when searching for obscene words

The search service of the “Yandex” company removed images and videos with the participation of Vladimir Putin if users searched for them using words that were not personal and insulting to the Russian president, reports the “Meduza” publication, whose journalists studied the company’s data warehouse that became publicly available.

Such words and phrases include, in particular, “chief thief”, “bunker grandfather”, “bald”, the search query “when he dies”, as well as a number of obscene expressions used against Putin by opponents of his policies. Similar search requests were automatically corrected by the Yandex internal service called ImgPatch (literally – image correction). The service also allows you to organize quick blocking of pictures and videos.

In addition, as Meduza reports, Yandex “protected from unpleasant associations” the letter Z, which is applied to Russian military equipment participating in the invasion of Ukraine, and which has become a symbol of support for the war.

At the same time, the Meduza article emphasizes that it is not known when exactly Yandex introduced censorship on the publication of Putin’s images, and to what extent it is still in effect. At the moment, when entering a number of the above-mentioned requests, images and videos with the President of Russia are found, but the reason for this may simply be the low-quality work of the filter.

• Last week, unknown people posted the source code of Yandex services, as well as the archives of the company’s internal repository. “Yandex” recognized a large-scale leak, and on Monday published the first results of its own investigation into what happened. They, in particular, say that the leak contains an outdated version of the code, which is different from the current one. Nevertheless, the company “begins work on the formation of new standards and principles of technoethics.”