MOSCOW — Russian President Vladimir Putin signed several laws last week to increase state control over information online, including one that introduces crippling fines for failing to remove “banned material.”
Although sexually explicit content is technically legal in Russia, existing laws banning “the illegal production, dissemination and advertisement of pornographic materials and objects" and other laws claiming to “protect the health of Russian children” are deployed by the state at its own discretion against sites hosting adult content.
The end-of-the-year legislative package signed into law by Putin, according to Reuters, also grants the Russian government “new powers to restrict U.S. social media giants, label individuals ‘foreign agents,’ and to crack down on the disclosure of its security officers' personal data.”
Putin’s government is currently engaged in a campaign to “increase Russia's internet sovereignty,” which according to observers might result in a closed, state-monitored internet, similar to what China achieved with its Great Firewall.
Some of the measures signed into law last week resulted from complaints about supposed bias and prejudice shown by Facebook, Twitter and YouTube against Russian media.
Twitter has labeled some tweets by Russia-based news outlets as ”state-affiliated media,” a move the Kremlin has protested as prejudicial. Putin’s government has attacked the U.S.-based platforms in terms almost identical to Donald Trump’s complaints about platform bias in his campaign to repeal Section 230 protections.
One of the new laws, according to Reuters, introduces “hefty fines of up to 20% of their previous year's Russia-based turnover for sites that repeatedly fail to remove banned content, something that YouTube and Facebook have often failed to do according to Russian lawmakers.”
Russian government agency Roskomnadzor maintains a blacklist that includes thousands of sites blocked for allegedly “violating the notoriously vague extremism legislation or child protection laws,” according to a 2016 BBC report.
The BBC mentioned the case of a woman who asked Roskomnadzor on Twitter if they could recommend alternative sites to watch adult content.
The agency’s social media manager replied, “You can meet someone in real life."