Avi Selk and David Filipov write: Russia has banned a picture depicting President Vladimir Putin as a potentially gay clown.
Russian news outlets are having trouble reporting exactly which image of the Internet’s many Putin-gay-clown memes is now illegal to share. Because, you know, it’s been banned.
But the picture was described last week on the Russian government’s list of things that constitute “extremism.”
Item 4071: a picture of a Putin-like person “with eyes and lips made up,” captioned with an implicit anti-gay slur, implying “the supposed nonstandard sexual orientation of the president of the Russian Federation.”
The Moscow Times thinks it probably looks like this:
A Russian court has banned an image suggesting Putin is gay & sentenced the culprit to compulsory psychiatric care. https://t.co/rUlOO5r6lp pic.twitter.com/hbkDHcndY5
— The Moscow Times (@MoscowTimes) April 5, 2017