MOSCOW — In a highly publicized case, a Russian court gave a political science student a three-year suspended sentence on Friday and barred him from managing websites for two years, for publishing videos in which he criticized the government of President Vladimir V. Putin.

Since his arrest at the beginning of August, Yegor S. Zhukov, 21, a student at Moscow’s prestigious Higher School of Economics, has become a symbol of a wave of anti-Kremlin protests that rocked the Russian capital last summer. His videos called upon viewers to use all possible means to depose Mr. Putin, whom he called a “dictator and a tyrant.”

The prosecution highlighted the escalating effort by the Kremlin, which already exercised firm control over nearly all traditional news sources, to clamp down on independent media online. Parliament has passed a series of laws recently, in a mostly unsuccessful effort to impose government control over the internet.

Outside the court in Moscow, a crowd of about 300 people, mostly students, chanted, “We are Yegor Zhukov,” and “accountability and love,” the main slogan from his closing statement.