Further strictening of Russian internet law passed the legislature Monday, and is expected to further cool Russian internet expression, while Russian President Vladimir Putin explained the law in terms of “the way its done everywhere” to deal with the CIA-initiated internet, and thanked Edward Snowden for playing his part.

Under the law, commonly refereed to as the “bloggers law” because the owner of any website–referred to as a “blog” in the language of the bill–with a daily following of 3,000 or more, including social media followers such as those on Twitter and Facebook, will be forced to register a real identity and address with the government, and will be responsible for any content posted on the site, including its accuracy. Henceforward, no internet user with a basic amount of social media clout will be anonymous legally in Russia, and will be held to the same standards as mass media outlets, but without the protections granted regular media. The law is expected to have a cooling effect on expression on the internet in Russia.

Recently, two of Russia’s largest blogging services, Yandex and LiveJournal–announced that publicly visible counters would stop below the 3000 number.

The law also requires all online platforms–search engines and social networks–to maintain records of everything posted online for the previous six months. The records must be kept inside Russia. In is not clear in the law whether this provision covers Google, Twitter, Facebook, and other international social media.

The new internet regulations will take force August 1.

The legislature also ruled Monday that as of July 1, common swearing will no longer be allowed in movies, television, theater or music. The four words that were banned are those crudely denoting male and female genitalia, sex and prostitutes.

Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed his views of the internet a few weeks ago on a live national TV broadcast, saying, “You know that it all began initially, when the Internet first appeared, as a special C.I.A. project.” “Special services are still at the center of things,” Putin continued, and thanked American fugitive exile in Russia, whistleblower Edward Snowden, for showing the world the efficiency of NSA data collection.

Putin explained the new law, saying that anyone affecting thousands or more people with their opinions should be considered a media outlet, and said that this was “the way it is done all over the world.”

Comparing the new internet laws to the Chinese model, one prominent critic said, “It is part of the general campaign to shut down the Internet in Russia. They have not been able to control it until now, and they think they should implement the Chinese model. But they don’t understand how it works. The Chinese model also stimulates the development of local platforms, while the Russian laws are killing the local platform.”

China employs a policy of tightening censorship of the internet, and has banned all Western social media, including Google, Facebook, YouTube and twitter.

Sources:

The Wire

Land and Sea Journal

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Feb. 1, 2014, an amendment to Russia’s “On Information, Information Technologies and Information Protection” law took effect.  The amendment allows the government to restrict access to websites with content that calls for riots, extremist activities, and participation in mass public events.

The bill is part of a trend in Russian law which began with President Vladimir Putin’s election to a second term in 2012.  The amendment in question allows the government to silence not only national criticism–it does this through other laws, such as its 139-FZ (2012) censorship law–but also criticism anywhere else in the world.  The measure shields Russia from political dissent.

A commonly cited example is Facebook.  During Russia’s 2012 presidential election, Facebook was used to organize protests against Putin.  Using the newly amended bill, the government’s agency responsible for monitoring such threats, Roskomnadzor (an acronym for Federal Service for Supervision in Telecommunications, Information Technology and Mass Communications), can contact Facebook when it finds such material and request Facebook remove the material.  If Facebook does not remove the material, Russia can block the site nationwide.

Roskomnadzor has had some success.  YouTube took videos, but filed a lawsuit in a Russian court to seek a finding that a video was not offensive (a video showing how to make fake cut-wounds).  Facebook removed a suicide-themed user group called “Club Suicid,” but stated that they had removed the video because it violated their terms of use, not because of the Russian legislation.  Facebook does block some content from some nations, such as Holocaust denial from Germany and France and defamation of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in Turkey.  Twitter removed posts that seemed to be related to drug deals and promoting suicidal thoughts.

The rationale for the bill was terrorism.  Child pornography, suicide encouragement, and drug information are also used to legitimize this category of legislation.  Roskomnadzor began by singling out only distressing material, such as real encouragement of suicide, child pornography and terrorism.  However, on March 13, 2014, several independent news sites were blocked.

Highbeam Business

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The Russian internet censorship bill, officially titled “On Amendments to Federal Law On Protecting Children from Information Harmful to Their Health and the Development and Certain Legislative Acts of the Russian Federation” (139-FZ of 2012-07-28) passed the Russian Duma in 2012.  It passed unanimously with support from all four parties.  441 out of 450 deputies voted to support the bill.  The bill had raced through the Duma, less than a week after the initial June 6 reading of the amendments and its June 11 third reading and passage.

The bill created a registry–or “blacklist.”  The registry was  a “uniform registry of domain names and (or) the universal locators to pages of sites on the Internet and network addresses of sites on the Internet that contain information prohibited to spread in the Russian Federation.”  Any site found to have information that was prohibited would be put on the registry.

The qualifications to be put on the registry were two, broadly.  First, federal executive authorities could decide to register a site if they found the site contained child pornography, almost any information relating to drugs, or almost any information about suicide.  Second, a court decision could place a site on a registry if the site had information found to be prohibited to be spread in Russia.  The federal agency appointed to monitor websites and the courts–which already have authority to ban material that violates Russian legislation–can add items to the blacklist.  Appeals to convictions can only be made within a three-month period.

The bill had originally included “extremist” online content, but the Duma removed this portion in the bill’s third reading.

Upon being found to qualify for registry, the owner of the site is to be notified within days, and must remove all content found to be prohibited within days.  If the hosting provider or the owner of the site fail to restrict access, the site’s network address is added to the government’s registry (even though the same IP can be used for thousands of sites).

Criticism of the bill was voiced this way by the Presidential Council for the Development of Civil Society Institutions and Human Rights:

“The bill is not aimed at combating the causes of illegal content and its distribution on the Internet and will not contribute to the effectiveness of law enforcement and prosecution of criminals, who will be able to migrate resources from illegal content in other domains and IP addresses. At the same time, many bona fide Internet resources with legal content may be affected by the mass blocking, since the system would impose severe restrictions on the basis of subjective criteria and assessments, which will make the Russian jurisdiction extremely unattractive for Internet businesses.”

By Day Blakely Donaldson

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