Moscow regularly sanctions large digital companies, accused of not erasing content promoting drugs or suicide, but also those linked to the opposition.
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Fine. A Russian court sentenced Google on Friday, December 24, to a record fine of 7.2 billion rubles (87 million euros at the current rate) for failing to remove content “prohibited”. In a statement on its Telegram account, the press service of the Moscow courts said the American giant had been found guilty of “recidivism” because the company had not removed content deemed illegal from its platforms. A few hours later, Facebook, via its parent company Meta, was fined 1.9 billion rubles (23.8 million euros at the current rate) for the same reason.
Sanctions are piling up in Russia against digital giants, the country regularly sanctioning large digital companies, accused of not erasing content promoting drugs, suicide and linked to the opposition. In September, just before the general elections, Moscow forced Apple and Google, accused of “electoral interference”, to withdraw from their virtual stores in Russia the application of the imprisoned opponent Alexeï Navalny.
Russia has also blocked several sites linked to the opponent, whose organizations have been recognized as “extremists” by the Russian courts. In September, Russian telecoms gendarme Roskomnadzor also announced that he had blocked six widely used virtual private network (VPN) software allowing access to the growing number of banned websites in Russia.