Russia’s largest publishing group fires employees who refused to censor queer literature

Per Meduza, Russia's largest publishing group has fired employees who refused to comply with new censorship rules tied to the country's expanding restrictions on certain content categories. Eksmo-AST, which publishes roughly seventy-five to ninety percent of Russian fiction, terminated staff after revising its internal regulations to enforce government restrictions, with some employees resigning rather than comply. The company is now using artificial intelligence to screen books against ten criteria — including rules targeting LGBTQ-plus content — and has already conducted approximately twenty thousand internal assessments of its catalog, sending six hundred books for additional expert review. The firings stem from an ongoing criminal case targeting publishers and staff accused of distributing books authorities classify as extremist materials, including works with LGBTQ-plus themes.

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