What a shameless and cowardly act by the government of Russia to require its blogosphere to provide personal information to the government.
Bastards.
| Not really surprising though, surely. |
Pepeliaev Group advises that, on 30 July 2024, the State Duma (the lower chamber of Russia’s Parliament) passed in its third reading Law No. 647048-8 “On amending the Federal Law “On communications” and certain legislative instruments of the Russian Federation” (the ‘Law”). The Law provides for amendments to be made to particular federal laws, including Federal Law No. 149-FZ “On information, information technologies and the protection of information” and Federal Law No. 38-FZ “On advertising”.
REQUIREMENTS FOR BLOGGERS
1. The Law introduces amendments to article 106 of the Federal Law “On information” (“On the specific aspects of how information is distributed on social networks”) which is proposed to be supplemented with the following provisions: if the audience of a blogger’s personal webpage is over 10,000 users of a social network, the blogger must submit to Roskomnadzor (the Russian Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and the Mass Media) information that allows for him or her to be identified. The Russian Government will establish the composition of such information and how it should be submitted.
Currently, there are no clarifications as to what an “audience” will mean and how the volume of the audience will be determined (for example, by the number of subscribers or the number of views of the content on a personal webpage). It is also unclear whether the requirements of the Law extend to companies’ corporate webpages on social networks.
We believe that, for the purposes of the Law, “social networks” may mean resources that have been included in Roskomnadzor's Register of social networks. These include, among others, Telegram, VKontakte, YouTube, Rutube, or Dzen. However, there are no official clarifications on this matter either.
The Law’s provisions concerning a blogger submitting his or her information to Roskomnadzor (para 3 of article 3(2)(b) of the Law) come into effect on the date on which the Law is officially published.
2. A blogger whose personal webpage has an audience exceeding 10,000 users must not allow for the subsequent distribution (reposting) on his/her webpage of information posted on another blogger's personal webpage which has not been included in the special register of bloggers that Roskomnadzor will maintain. This requirement (para 4 of article 3(2)(b) of the Law) comes into effect on 1 January 2025.
In particular, Roskomnadzor will maintain a list of personal webpages whose audience exceeds 10,000 users (the “List”). This means that the List will include personal webpages of bloggers who simultaneously:
- meet the above criteria (i.e. they have submitted information to Roskomnadzor regarding themselves, and they do not repost information from other bloggers’ pages, which, in turn, have not been included in the List);
- do not disseminate information in violation of the requirements of Russian legislation or information that is prohibited from being disseminated in Russia.
The second requirement is extremely broad and requires a blogger to thoroughly evaluate all information that he/she disseminates on his/her webpage in terms of whether it complies with Russian legislation.