Purge of telegram channels disloyal to officials has reached the Volga region

January 16 was marked by the consideration of two cases at once in relation to the Saratov tg-channels. We are talking about the lawsuit of the ex-mayor and head of the regional duma, Mikhail Isaev, as well as the lawsuit of the rector of the SSLA, Ekaterina Ilgova. However, the BV expert is sure that it is unlikely that Telegram itself will be able to remove posts, but it is quite possible to ban the media from referring to them. Penza took a different path.

Ekaterina Ilgova

Ms Rector has already secured a court decision. Earlier, she asked the Oktyabrsky District Court to restrict access to the Mockingjay TV channel. In the Saratov tg-space, this is one of the most popular channels – 7.9 thousand subscribers – and channels merciless to officials.

The claim of Ekaterina Ilgova is related to the publication dated July 27, 2022. It spoke about the alleged illegal deductions of 500 rubles each from the scholarships of the Academy students to support the residents of Donbass.

Rector Ilgova believes that the post contains false information and asked the court to restrict access to information that discredits her honor and dignity. She presented documents according to which there were deductions, but of a standard nature – taxes on personal income and deductions to the union.

The court upheld the plaintiff and satisfied her demands, the court decision should come into force within two weeks. True, how it will be implemented is unknown: the author and owner of the channel is unknown.

It is interesting that “BV” could not find the case of the rector of the SSLA in the list of cases of the Oktyabrsky Court scheduled for hearing on January 16. As it was not found at all in the file of the court – all cases with the name Ilgova relate to 2020-2021 and are not related to libel. However, it is possible that the site’s search engine does not allow finding this surname.

Mikhail Isaev

The Zavodskoy District Court is much more predictable in this regard: the hearing on the claim of the ex-mayor Mikhail Isaev is perfectly displayed in the list of cases scheduled for today.

Recall that together with the deputy of the State Duma of the Russian Federation Andrei Vorobyov (but he is in the Engels district court), the head of the regional duma complained about the information that some unnamed TV channels circulate about them. Both plaintiffs consider this information to be slander.

But if Mikhail Isaev asks to recognize the information disseminated by the channels as invalid, then Andrey Vorobyov went further and demanded that the TG channels themselves be blocked, which, as he told reporters, “crap and dirty tricks on the sly.” The parliamentarian’s attempt turned out to be unsuccessful – Judge Dmitry Lavrov returned the statement of claim to him with the wording “failure to comply with the instructions of the judge.”

The respondent in both cases was Teltgram FZ- LLC, an Android messaging application publisher registered in the intra-UAE Special Economic Zone in Dubai.

Today, according to reports from the Saratov media, it became known which posts in which tg channels should be deleted. We are talking about the channels “Actually”, “One grandmother said”, “Shorohi Kumyski”, “Mockingjay”, “Adult Spectator Theatre”, “Our Man in the Cheka”.

“The plaintiff’s logic is that since he does not appear in criminal cases related to this topic, it means that the contested posts in the channels discredit his reputation,” the sources clarify, noting that neither the plaintiff nor the defendant’s representative appeared in court.

According to Judge Yulia Tkachenko’s decision today, information that does not correspond to reality should be blocked. We are talking about messages on three of the six channels, but not blocking the publics themselves. How it is possible to restrict access to a specific message in the messenger is not specified. The reasoning part of the judgment will be ready in a few days.

Lawyer’s opinion

Earlier, the head of the Argument legal bureau, Andrey Larin, suggested that the claims of politicians would most likely be satisfied. But Pavel Durov and Telegram will not even notice this.

– I think that the court will order the removal of some materials if it is slander. And Mikhail Isaev can send this court decision to Telegram. They will consider the decision there, and if they consider it necessary to delete the publications, they will delete it, and if they don’t consider it, they will ignore it, the expert suggested.

According to Andrey Larin, the Saratov decisions are unlikely to become a precedent for the subsequent cleansing of TG channels across Russia. Telegram’s policy is such that the administration of the messenger periodically deletes publications and channels if it turns out that they are related to the drug trade or promote outright extremism. Otherwise, the team of Pavel Durov does not interfere in the subject of publications and makes decisions on controversial materials solely at its own discretion. If he ignores the decision of the courts from the Saratov region, no sanctions against him can be expected.

The purpose of filing a lawsuit, the expert noted, is most likely not to force the owners of the messenger to take any action. The main reason is the information itself, which applicants do not like.

– I think that in this situation, Mikhail Isaev filed a lawsuit not to oblige Telegram to do something, but in order to have some kind of prejudice, a judicial act that gives him protection from certain information. Not for the sake of Telegram deleting something, but in order to refer to these court decisions in the future. If someone quotes tg-channels, and it will not be an anonymous person, then Isaev will attract him, – Andrey Larin concluded.

And he stated: even if the information cannot be removed from anonymous channels, then at least it will be possible to prohibit them from being quoted in the media or social networks in this way.

Practice Penza

However, we recall that in the Penza region, the security officers managed to establish the author of the TG-channel “Penza accordion”, where posts critical of the then acting governor Oleg Melnichenko were published. Moreover, the head of the region did not go to court.

Instead, a video suddenly appeared on the channel with its author and owner Colonel of the Customs Service, Deputy Head of the Penza Regional Customs Post Anatoly Davydov. He repented of publishing unreliable information discrediting the inhabitants of Penza and the Penza region, announced the closure of the channel and apologized to subscribers and personally to Mr. Melnichenko.
Volga.brief and a number of other tg-channels then attributed the laurels from the closure of the opposition channel directly to Melnichenko. However, according to other sources, Davydov allegedly “brought strong guys in civilian clothes” to record the video. They also suggest that the recording was made directly from the investigator’s office.