Back in 2014, Russia enforced a new “bloggers” law, which requires bloggers and social media users who have over 3,000 daily visitors to register with the government. As a result, Intel had shut down its Russian forums and blogs. Despite the fact that the law was enforced quite a lot of time ago, only less than 370 blogs and social media accounts have currently registered.
When asked why bloggers would want to register, Russian authorities claimed that registering could help attract more advertising dollars. In the meantime, the blogger law is intended to improve the quality of Russian blogging, by lowering the amount of profanity, unverified information, and libel. However, the critics believe that the law is aimed at silencing criticism.
Another interesting fact is that 3 of the 370 blogs on the registry contain the word “fuck” in their names: one of them is the community “Fuckbet,” a sports analysis website, another is “Fuck_Humor”, a group specializing in amusing memes.
Back in 2014, Russian officials threatened to block social networks like Twitter and
for not cooperating with the new registry plans. The most hilarious move of the authorities was the following: since Twitter fails to cooperate on the registry requirement, Russian Twitter users were asked to post screenshots of their analytics page to show that they're getting too many visitors. This doesn’t seem to help, because the 10 Twitter users who are currently on the blogger registry are pro-Kremlin media figures and Internet celebrities.
At the moment, it remains unknown what Russia will do with bloggers who have failed to register. Anyway, the bloggers law is still concerning for supporters of free speech.
When asked why bloggers would want to register, Russian authorities claimed that registering could help attract more advertising dollars. In the meantime, the blogger law is intended to improve the quality of Russian blogging, by lowering the amount of profanity, unverified information, and libel. However, the critics believe that the law is aimed at silencing criticism.
Another interesting fact is that 3 of the 370 blogs on the registry contain the word “fuck” in their names: one of them is the community “Fuckbet,” a sports analysis website, another is “Fuck_Humor”, a group specializing in amusing memes.
Back in 2014, Russian officials threatened to block social networks like Twitter and
Facebook
At the moment, it remains unknown what Russia will do with bloggers who have failed to register. Anyway, the bloggers law is still concerning for supporters of free speech.
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