Head of the Human Rights Council: “US IT companies have surpassed Soviet censorship in terms of severity”
Moscow
American news companies and social networks are actively attacking freedom of speech
Chairman of the Human Rights Council under the President of the Russian Federation Valery Fadeev stated this in an interview with Izvestia, answering a question about his attitude to the regulation of foreign social networks and possible measures to slow down their work,
“We were the first to say that this is a serious problem and we need to include legal instruments to resolve it. When industrial and financial companies operate in our market, they operate in accordance with Russian legislation. It's like that all over the world. If a company wants to operate in a foreign territory, it operates in accordance with the laws of that country. But this is not the case with information companies; they operate in accordance with their American laws. And this causes concern, to put it mildly,” Fedorov said.
“In Europe, for example, serious measures are being taken against these companies. And now these companies are beginning to be introduced into the Russian legal field. Naturally, they resist, but this resistance must be overcome. I'm sure this can be done. We are not alone here, in fact all of Europe is with us,” added the Chairman of the HRC.
Answering the question why Russia took so long to move towards the norms that have long been adopted in the EU, the publication’s interlocutor explained that a hyper-liberal attitude towards the Internet and information companies dominated in the Russian Federation, and it was also assumed that this area of activity should be absolutely free.
“But experience shows that this is too serious an area of activity to allow the absence of some regulatory factors in this space. If we talk about American IT companies, then on their part we see an attack on freedom of speech and censorship. Censorship by US IT companies is much stricter than, for example, Soviet censorship. In Soviet times, it was at least possible to bargain with the censor. As for IT companies now, there is no one to talk to. The ban is all. They throw you out of YouTube, for example,” Fedorov concluded.
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