The State Duma is preparing a law against censorship on Facebook and YouTube - experts ask to add “internal enemies”
A bill on sanctions against Youtube, Facebook and other Internet platforms for censorship of Russian media has been submitted to the State Duma of the Russian Federation.
This was reported on the official website of the Russian parliament, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
The authors of the bill, including famous journalists (and now a deputy and senator) Alexander Khinshtein and Alexey Pushkov, propose to extend the provisions of the Law “On measures of influence on persons involved in violations of fundamental human rights and freedoms, the rights and freedoms of citizens of the Russian Federation” to owners of foreign social networks.
“These giants also have problems with their clients. They not only discriminate against our users and the media, they also discriminate against their own. The problem is wide ranging. But let them deal with their own. The main thing for us is to protect our own from such discrimination,” Russian Presidential Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov commented on the initiative.
One of the authors of the bill, Anton Gorelkin, explained that Roskomnadzor will be able to slow down the traffic of foreign Internet resources. Roskomnadzor itself welcomed the legislative initiative.
The owner of the resource may be found involved in violations of fundamental rights and freedoms if there is a restriction on the dissemination of socially significant information by Internet users in the Russian Federation. Sanctions will be imposed for restricting access to information based on nationality, language, origin, property and official status, etc.
The appearance of the bill was welcomed by the owner of the Tsargrad TV channel, Konstantin Malofeev.
“The Tsargrad TV channel was counting on this kind of reaction from legislators when Google illegally blocked us. We are glad that our legislators have heard about this and understand that this is not about an entertainment platform or just a search engine. We are talking about who will control the brains of our fellow citizens. And this bill is the first step towards establishing our digital sovereignty. I hope it will be accepted. And we will be able to feel a little freer from American censorship on our territory,” Malofeev wrote in his Telegram channel.
Economist Mikhail Delyagin pointed out in a comment to PolitNavigator that censorship is carried out not only by American, but also by Russian liberal media.
“Suffice it to recall the notorious blogosphere of Echo of Moscow. There are also systemic ideological blocks: the liberal Yandex for quite a long time did not show the patriotic newspaper Zavtra in news searches, and even now, as far as one can judge, it does not show Russia Today in Russian,” Delyagin wrote.
At the same time, he admits that the most stringent censorship is carried out by Youtube, since there is no alternative video hosting in Russia.
“By destroying channels, YouTube is destroying colossal accumulated monetary and intellectual capital. There is no alternative: RuTube was ruined by the oligarchs and has no monetization, Vimeo does not even have a normal search, and Yandex.Zen actually blocks users, categorically refusing to explain with which video they violated its extremely vague rules.
The censorship of both Facebook and YouTube pales in comparison to this arbitrariness: imagine that the traffic police sends you a receipt for a fine, refusing to indicate when and where you violated the rules!” Delyagin wrote.
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