A Russian Teen Sentenced to Prison for Minecraft

With its unique style and wide audience Minecraftis one of the most popular games in the world. The game, in which you can design and build things with blocks, is known for making the players addicted to it, although it has a very simple gameplay and graphics.

But for a group of Russian teenagers, Minecraft is more than just a simple game. serious took a turn. The head of the Russian youth is building a ‘government building’ that they have built in Minecraft, not in real life detonate He got into trouble for planning.

One of the teenagers was sentenced to five years in prison

The group, consisting of Nikita Uvarov and two other youths, had previously been detained in the summer of 2020 for distributing leaflets in support of a Moscow mathematician and anarchist activist on trial for vandalism. The police, who seized the phones of the young people who put one of the leaflets in a local FSB building, which is Russia’s powerful security agency, destroyed an FSB building created by the youth in the game. blow up plans found it.

Lawyer Pavel Chikov said in an interview that the charges against two of the three young people collaborating with the authorities have been dropped; but by the Siberian military court of 16-year-old Nikita Uvarov “training on terrorist activities” on the grounds five years in prison He said he had been sentenced.

Speaking to a newspaper about the subject, Uvarov said, “I want to say this for the last time in court: I am not a terrorist. “ used the phrases. All you want is Russia leave and continue your education Uvarov stated that “I want to finish school, study and go somewhere far from here. I want the court to let me do that” recorded as. Noting that the building does not exist in real life, Uvarov denied that he wanted to blow up anything in real life.

People are being wronged by algorithms that predict the risk of committing a crime

No one has the ability to predict something that hasn’t happened yet, or the luxury of assuming an event that hasn’t happened. However, this is not the first time such an incident has occurred. In 2020, a 30-year-old man reveals that his years of struggle with parole officers has proven to be beneficial for incarcerated individuals. an ‘algorithm’ that predicts the risk of committing a crimeHe had learned that it was due to Activists have been fighting for a long time against systems that use such personal data to predict the probability of an event before it physically happens.

These algorithms ‘human bias’ coded, naturally marginalized groups suffer more from such systems. On the other hand, Russia doesn’t even need to use algorithms to blame these young people; this decision only based on in-game activity They give their own estimates. But by that logic, shouldn’t all players who love first-person shooters be convicted as well?