Based on local laws applying to bloggers, Twitter could be affected

May 16, 2014 13:46 GMT  ·  By

Following a new set of rules applied to Russian bloggers, Twitter and Facebook may end up blocked in the country.

According to RT, a senior official from the control agency Roskomnadzor, new restrictions would apply to all bloggers whose content appears in Russia, even if they live abroad.

The new set of rules defines “popular bloggers” as those who have at least 3,000 visitors per day. The country demands that they be registered under their real names and follow basic rules – verify their reports and abstain from writing slander massages about anything that registers as ethnic, religious or social hatred.

“The law is not tied to the territorial registration or passport data. If someone writes in Russian or any other language used by the peoples of the Russian Federation, if he or she is seeking to attract the Russian audience’s attention and if they use Russian sites for this, such people will have to observe the law,” said Deputy Chief of Roskomnadzor Maksim Ksendzov.

Since the law doesn’t mention anything about whether the rules only apply to people inside Russia, the authority basically extends its reach to anything posted online that can be seen in Russia.

According to Ksendzov, the agency would most likely have to block the whole blog platform or social network in Russia if bloggers refuse to take down content that doesn’t comply with local laws.

He continues saying that major companies such as Twitter and Facebook were reluctant to cooperate, but Google has been working to remove offensive and illegal videos from YouTube. Furthermore, if Roskomnadzor blocks one single tweet, the entire platform would become unavailable in Russia because of the way it encodes its traffic.

The company’s attitude towards demands to block content hasn’t been helping Twitter’s case in Russia either. Ksendzov mentioned that through its refusal to comply with demands, Twitter is deliberately creating the necessary conditions to block the entire platform.

Dmitry Medvedev, Russian prime minister, has downplayed the situation, advising state employees to “turn their brains on” and give no interviews where they announce they’re going to shut down entire social networks.

Twitter has been against censorship from the very beginning, looking to protect its users above all. Even though it has shared information with governments about users who posted various types of messages on the platform, it has only done that after it received a court order and even then it sometimes decided to fight back.

The company has conceded to censor some tweets and accounts as per request from the Turkish government under threat of blocking the entire platform.