Russian court fined Facebook and Google millions of dollars for refusing to remove 'prohibited content'

The magistrates' court in Moscow (Russia) found Google guilty of refusing to delete prohibited information and for the first time in the Russian Federation awarded the company a turnover fine of more than 7,2 billion rubles ($ 98 million). The court also awarded a fine to Meta (formerly Facebook) - this giant will have to pay 2 billion rubles ($ 27 million). Writes about it with the BBC.

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“For the first time, a Russian court has imposed fines amounting to a share of the revenue of these companies for the year in Russia,” says a message on the Roskomnadzor telegram channel.

Russian courts began to fine Western social networks for failure to remove information banned in Russia only this year. The Administrative Code was supplemented by Article 13.41 at the end of 2020. Roskomnadzor sends the protocols to the court if social networks ignore the requirements of the regulator and do not block publications pointed to by the authorities.

At first, the courts fine social networks for relatively small amounts for them, but if violations, according to Roskomnadzor and the courts, continue, and the networks do not remove “prohibited content,” then the court imposes a revolving fine—this is a certain percentage of the companies’ revenue. This fine is usually many times higher.

After the trial, Roskomnadzor said that the materials discussed in the protocols were “only a small part of the content that violates Russian laws.” According to the statement, more than 2 thousand materials remain undeleted on Facebook and Instagram, and over 2,6 thousand on Google.

Up to 10% of turnover

The turnover penalty can be up to 10% of a company's revenue per year in Russia.

“The freewheeling spread of destructive content on the Internet has ended,” the head of the Safe Internet League, Ekaterina Mizulina, responded to the court’s decision.

Roskomnadzor reported that a total of 2021 protocols were drawn up against Meta in 23, and 21 protocols against Google. Among other things, the department emphasized that if other materials are not removed, new turnover fines are possible.

What is fined for

Roskomnadzor calls the most harmful and dangerous posts with child pornography, calls for suicide, drug propaganda, as well as extremist materials or posts that offend the authorities.

However, as the journalists found out, this year most of the claims from Roskomnadzor related to posts about protests in support of the politician Alexei Navalny, who returned from treatment from Germany and was sent to serve time in a colony.

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Over the year, Western social networks were fined more than 150 million rubles ($ 2 million).

In total, at the time of drawing up the protocol regarding Meta, 1043 materials remained unremoved on Facebook, 973 on Instagram, and 2,4 thousand on YouTube.

Roskomnadzor demanded a turnover fine for Facebook for repeated failure to delete nine links. What kind of materials it is is unknown.

Will companies pay

Meta (Facebook) does not disclose its revenue in Russia - the company does not have a representative office or offices in the Russian Federation. Mizulina said that over the past year, Facebook’s revenue in Russia amounted, according to her data, to approximately 39 billion rubles ($530 million).

The head of the League of Safe Internet Yekaterina Mizulina proposed to direct the fines paid by foreign companies to social assistance.

“We need to somehow make up for the moral and psychological damage caused by the inaction of these companies,” she wrote.

However, Finam analyst Leonid Delitsyn estimated the company’s revenue to be much lower - only 12 billion rubles ($163 million).

The head of Roskomnadzor, Andrei Lipov, said that the Russian revenue of foreign companies is determined by the Federal Antimonopoly Service and the court.

“Not all social networks have tangible revenue. For Twitter, for example, it is small,” he noted.

Google has a legal entity in Russia, but it is not an official representative office.

According to the SPARK database, the company's turnover in 2020 amounted to 1 billion rubles ($ 13,5 million).

But Mizulina insists that Google in Russia earned 2020 billion rubles ($ 220 billion) in 3.

“We will study the court’s decision and after that we will determine further steps,” Google’s press service said, commenting on the new fine.

If companies refuse to pay turnover fines, it will be difficult for bailiffs to collect them (to arrest accounts, property or bring employees to justice), since the companies have no official representative offices in the country.

At the same time, the Moscow court, in another dispute with the participation of Google LLC, emphasized that the company on the corporation's website was named Google's office in Russia. This means that it is a representative office of Google LLC, the court ruled.

Stanislav Seleznev, senior partner of the Network Freedoms project, does not agree with this logic.

In his opinion, a representative office cannot be an independent legal entity. The fact that Google LLC is the founder of the Russian legal entity Google LLC does not make this organization an official branch or representative office of Google LLC.

The expert believes that the situation in which the Russian authorities did not have leverage on foreign IT companies became a trigger for the adoption of a law on their "landing". In 2022, foreign companies will be obliged to create full-fledged representative offices in Russia. For failure to comply with this requirement, the authorities threaten them with a ban on receiving money from advertising in Russia and blocking.

Minister of Digital Development Maksut Shadayev called economic impact a priority method of putting pressure on foreign companies, and blocking resources was a last resort.

Can Facebook and Google be blocked in Russia

Experts do not predict an instant blocking of the social network Facebook in the event the company refuses to pay a fine. However, the authorities have more than enough grounds for blocking from the point of view of Russian law, said Sarkis Darbinyan, a leading lawyer for the Roskomsvoboda project.

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“Legal instruments have already been created. Locks work more efficiently. It's a matter of political will. We don't know how the authorities will behave. Naturally, these decisions are made not by Roskomnadzor, but by the presidential administration. Everything is going step by step. The Russian authorities cannot block everyone in one day,” Darbinyan believes.

Facebook really could have been blocked a long time ago, if only for refusing to transfer data about Russian users to Russia. This requirement has been provided for since 2015 by the “anti-terrorism package” of laws of deputy Irina Yarovaya.

Roskomnadzor demanded that Facebook move its servers to Russia back in 2016.

For refusing to transfer servers with data to Russia in 2016, by the decision of the Tagansky Court of Moscow, the recruiting social network LinkedIn was blocked.

Facebook has already been threatened with blocking and fined, but it has not yet come to restrict access to the social network. In 2019, Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg made it clear that the company would not move data to countries where human rights are violated.

The restraining factors for the authorities are rather the economic consequences of blocking Western social networks, Darbinyan believes. Facebook and YouTube are the largest advertising platforms.

The reason that restrains the authorities from blocking may be the possible sharp radicalization of a part of the population that will remain without access to popular social networks, Darbinyan suggests.

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