Minecraft is one of the most popular games in the world, with its unique style and wide-ranging player base. 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 has become a little more serious than just a simple game. Russian teenagers got in trouble for planning to blow up a ‘government building’ they had built in Minecraft, not in real life.
One of the youth was sentenced to five years in prison
Nikita Uvarov and the group of two other youths, previously in the summer of 2020, a Moscow mathematician and anarchist activist on trial for vandalism. He had been detained for distributing leaflets supporting it. The police, who seized the phones of the young people who put one of the leaflets in a local FSB building, Russia’s powerful security agency, found in the game plans to blow up an FSB building created by the youth.
Lawyer Pavel Chikov, in his interview, stated that the charges against two of the three youths who cooperated with the authorities were dropped; however, he noted that 16-year-old Nikita Uvarov was sentenced by a Siberian military court to five years in prison for “training for terrorist activities”.
Speaking to a newspaper on the subject, Uvarov said, “I want to say this for the last time in court: I am not a terrorist. “he used the phrases. Stating that his only wish is to leave Russia and continue his education, Uvarov said, “I want to finish my school, get an education and go somewhere far from here. I want the court to allow me to do this.” Uvarov denied that he wanted to blow anything up in real life
People are wronged by algorithms that predict the risk of committing a crime
Predicting something no one has yet He doesn’t have the ability or the luxury of assuming an event that didn’t happen, but this isn’t the first time such an event has happened.In 2020, a 30-year-old man, after years of battle with parole officers, created an ‘algorithm’ that predicts the risk of delinquency in incarcerated individuals. By using such personal data, an event occurred before it physically happened. Activists have long fought against systems that predict probability.
Since ‘human bias’ is encoded into these algorithms, 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; they make this decision based on in-game activity only, based on their own guesses. But by that logic, shouldn’t all players who love first-person shooters be convicted as well?
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