Russia is planning to introduce a new bill that would ban foreign social media sites in the country. This comes after censorship of Russian news agencies operating abroad. Sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are mentioned in the explanatory notes accompanying the new draft bill, which was submitted to the Russian Duma for discussion last week.
Lawmakers in Russia said that since April, state authorities had received complaints from editors of Russian news sites whose social media accounts on the aforementioned sites had been censored. In particular, Russian lawmakers noted that media outlets such as Russia Today , RIA Novosti and Crimea 24 were censored. In total, about 20 acts of censorship were recorded. The acts of censorship mentioned in the notes to the bill refer to rules introduced on Twitter and Facebook this year and on YouTube in 2018.
Specifically, these three social media sites display special labels on the profiles of news agencies related to Russia and have reduced their visibility on their sites, removing their content from their recommendation algorithms.
Russian lawmakers called these rules “unreasonable restrictions” that “discriminate against material and content originating from Russian media,” while also describing them as “violations of the fundamental human rights and freedoms of Russian citizens.”
This new bill is expected to give the Russian Prosecutor General's Office and the Foreign Ministry the authority to ban sites that impose these restrictions on Russian news sites.
As ZDNet reports, once a decision is made, the Russian telecommunications watchdog, Roskomnadzor, will be called upon to enforce the ban through the national “sites blacklist” system, which already includes LinkedIn , which has been banned in Russia since 2016.
Russia also announced the launch of new proceedings against Google, as the tech giant fails to censor up to 30% of “dangerous” content from search results displayed to Russian citizens.
