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| - A court in Belarus has described as "extremist" the Nexta Live opposition Telegram channel, which mobilised protesters during the ongoing post-election rallies in the country, according to documents published Tuesday. The Poland-based channel, with close to two million subscribers, and its logo are now "extremist materials", according to a ruling by the Minsk Central District Court made available online. The court ordered the Belarus information ministry to "immediately" take action and limit access to Nexta Live's resources in Belarus on the internet. Nexta, meaning "somebody" in Belarusian, has been one of the major sources of information on the protests in Belarus which erupted after the landslide victory of long-standing President Alexander Lukashenko in an August election. The channel was founded in 2015 by popular Belarus blogger Stepan Svetlov. He is currently facing several criminal charges in Belarus and resides in Poland. Telegram is a hugely popular social media in the former USSR region as a messaging service both for private communication and sharing information and news. The opposition accuses Lukashenko of rigging the election and believes that his main challenger Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, now in exile in Lithuania, was the real winner. The channel and its logo have also been added to the Belarus list of extremist materials found on the information ministry's website. Other resources on the list include anarchist Facebook pages and several books on Islam. The case was initiated by the Belarus interior ministry's unit for combating crime and corruption which accuses the channel of making public calls inciting mass riots, the ministry's press service said in a statement. It added that the re-branding of the channel or a change in logotype will not lead to it being lifted from the extremist materials list. Individuals who share any information from the Nexta Live channel will face administrative charges, the interior ministry said. The spokesman for the Belarus journalists' association, Boris Goretsky, told AFP that individuals could be fined up to 400 euros and legal entities up to 4,000 euros. Belarus media expert Pavlyuk Bykovsky was reluctant to judge whether individuals will be held accountable if the Telegram channel is found on their phone. "There shouldn't be responsibility. But what is going to happen now -- nobody is ready to predict," Bykovsky told AFP. tk-acl/sjw/txw
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