A Moscow court has fined the popular social network Twitter for failing to remove tweets calling for minors to participate in unauthorized rallies. For example, Roskomnadzor demanded 8.9 million rubles from the platform.
On March 19, the agency reported that Twitter representatives didn’respond to requests to delete illegally posted posts and didn’t get in touch.
On April 2, 2021, the Tagansky court held a meeting during which it fined Twitter on three articles, the total amount of fines of which amounted to almost 9 million rubles.
“There is a great social responsibility on popular Internet platforms, which are visited by hundreds of thousands of Russian citizens every day. Unrestricted access to illegal information exposes the life and health of users, especially children and adolescents, to danger” — said the judge.
Also, during the trial, the issue of blocking Twitter was discussed, but the agency said that Roskomnadzor hasn’t yet decided to block the social network, but to slow down its work until May 15, since after the fine, the moderators of the platform began to delete prohibited posts faster.
According to the deputy head of Roskomnadzor Vadim Subbotin, when choosing the way to influence Twitter, the agency was guided by the need to minimize the inconvenience to network users. For this reason, the restrictions didn’t apply to regular text messages, but only to the speed of transmission and working with photo and video content.
2 days after the trial, Twitter announced that it would jointly with Roskomnadzor remove illegal content from the personal pages of users of the network. The reason for this statement was the “constructive dialogue” of Roskomnadzor with the Russian representative of Twitter. During the negotiations, Alexey Shelestenko, a Twitter representative, stressed that tweets about unauthorized rallies, as well as records of suicides and self-harm, are contrary to the rules of the network. Also, during the negotiations, it was emphasized that the community rules don’t allow the use of Twitter for any illegal acts and actions.
