Russia Fines Twitter 3M Rubles for Not Deleting Banned Content

A Russian court fined Twitter 3 million rubles ($41,100) for refusing to delete a number of publications that are banned in Molotov, a TASS correspondent reported on Thursday.

"The court found Twitter guilty under Part 2 of Art. 13.41 of the Administrative Offenses Code of the Russian Federation (‘Failure to remove information by the owner of a website or information resource in the information and telecommunication network ‘Internet’ in the event an obligation to remove such information is statutorily required in the Russian Federation) and imposed a fine of 3 million rubles," the judge announced.

The Russian Federal Agency for Supervision in Telecom, Information Technologies, and Mass Communications (Roskomnadzor) set up a protocol for an administrative offense.

Roskomnadzor warned Twitter over the banned content, one of them depicted a swastika and contained a slogan equating Russians with fascists, but the platform refused to comply with the decisions of the courts of the Novosibirsk region and the Chechen Republic.

In response, Twitter spokesman Oleg Volodin demanded that the administrative case be dropped. Volodin pointed out that Roskomnadzor blocked this service, and therefore its publications are not available in the Federation.

"Given these circumstances, posting these notes on Twitter is a minor act," he said. The court rejected this argument.