NEW YORK (Sept. 9, 2026) — The Human Rights Foundation (HRF) condemns the decision by Austin-based WP Engine to block access from Russia to tyrannytracker.org, the website of HRF’s Tyranny Tracker, at the demand of Roskomnadzor, the Russian Federation’s censorship agency.
On Sept. 3, WP Engine, a web hosting company based in Austin, Texas, informed HRF that it had received a demand letter from Roskomnadzor, claiming that the Tyranny Tracker “violates the national laws of Russia.” WP Engine informed HRF that it would geo-block the site from Russia within 24 hours “on [HRF’s] behalf” unless HRF implemented the block. HRF refused and sent a letter to WP Engine, asking the company to reconsider its decision to follow Russia’s unlawful request. By late afternoon the same day, less than 24 hours after WP Engine’s notice was received, HRF’s internal investigation showed that the Tyranny Tracker website was already inaccessible from Russian IP addresses.
Roskomnadzor’s demand, as shared by WP Engine, is a brief notice that does not cite any law, article, statute, or regulation that the Tyranny Tracker allegedly violates, and does not identify any specific content on the site that it considers unlawful. It simply directs the “hosting provider” to tell the site owner to “immediately delete the information disseminated in violation of the law” and, failing that, to “restrict access to the specified information resource” after 24 hours.
“There is no neutral way to describe what is happening here,” HRF Chief Legal and Policy Officer Javier El-Hage said. “A regime that imprisons journalists directed an American company to prevent people in Russia from reading a website documenting its tyranny — and the company agreed, without a court order, and without a single law that made it do so. WP Engine has essentially made itself a tool of the Kremlin’s censorship and transnational repression.”
“Every journalist and activist in Russia knows what a Roskomnadzor notice is: a tool of censorship and repression,” HRF Chair Yulia Navalnaya said. “What none of us expected was that a company in Texas would be the enforcer of perhaps the world’s most oppressive dictatorship.”
In doing so, WP Engine has departed from its own commitments. On Mar. 22, 2022, the company published a statement on its website, since deleted, condemning the Russian regime for its aggression against Ukraine and for “stifling free speech, curbing internet access, and censoring independent media,” and declaring that WP Engine “cannot allow the perpetrators of these attacks to also stifle access to information.” Four years later, WP Engine has done precisely that.
The block comes one month after the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Russian Federation designated HRF an “undesirable” organization on Aug. 6, 2026, expressly citing the Tyranny Tracker, which classifies the Russian Federation as a “fully authoritarian regime”, as the basis for the designation. Having criminalized HRF’s work inside Russia, the Kremlin is now enlisting American companies to ensure that the people it rules cannot see that assessment for themselves.
HRF’s Tyranny Tracker is a qualitative global democracy index that tracks the authoritarian actions of 176 countries and territories worldwide across three pillars (electoral competition, freedom of dissent, and institutional accountability) and 45 indicators, ultimately classifying them as democratic, hybrid authoritarian, or fully authoritarian regimes. Developed by HRF’s legal and policy team as an internal research project over a decade and launched to the public this past February in New York, with the crucial support of The Reynolds Foundation, the Tyranny Tracker finds that 76% of the world’s population lives under authoritarianism.
HRF calls on democratic governments, and on companies operating in democratic countries, to reject the Kremlin’s attempts to export its censorship and repression beyond Russia’s borders. HRF has not implemented, and will not implement, any restriction on access to the Tyranny Tracker. HRF’s initiatives serving activists, journalists, and political prisoners continue undeterred, and HRF will ensure that the Tyranny Tracker’s findings continue to reach readers in Russia, as they reach readers under every other regime that has tried to block them.
HRF’s letter to WP Engine
The full text of HRF’s letter to WP Engine of Sept. 4 is available by clicking the button below.
