Roskomnadzor will “partially restrict” access to Facebook due to the blocking of a number of Russian media outlets. How exactly – the department did not specify, experts believe that the speed of access to the social network will be slowed down, as happened with Twitter earlier.
Roskomnadzor announced the beginning of a partial restriction of access to the social network Facebook (owned by Meta Platforms, Inc.), according to the agency’s website.
“In accordance with the decision of the Prosecutor General’s Office regarding the social network Facebook, starting from February 25, 2022, Roskomnadzor, in accordance with the law, takes measures to partially restrict access,” the message says.
As indicated by the department, this is due to the restriction on official accounts of Russian media, which is contrary to Russian law. Roskomnadzor demanded to lift restrictions on Russian media, including RIA Novosti, the Zvezda TV channel, Lenta.ru and Gazeta.ru, and to explain the reason for their imposition, but the company ignored these demands.
As a result, the Prosecutor General’s Office, in agreement with the Foreign Ministry, recognized the social network as involved in the violation of fundamental rights and freedoms of a person and citizens of Russia.
RBC sent a request to Facebook and Roskomnadzor.
Roskomnadzor has been partially restricting access to Twitter for almost a year now: since March 2021, with the help of special equipment, which, according to the so-called “sovereign Runet” law, was installed on the networks of all mobile and major fixed-line operators in the country, the agency slows down the speed of access to this social network. Authorities cited as a reason that the platform did not remove content banned in Russia.
Facebook was sanctioned by the law against foreign social networks and IT resources in case of discrimination against Russians by them, which came into force at the end of 2020 and provides for a procedure by which the Prosecutor General has the right, in agreement with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to assign the status of “involved in violations of fundamental rights and freedoms” of a person and a citizen of Russia. One of the reasons for the application of this law is to limit the dissemination of “publicly significant information.” Having received a notification from the Prosecutor General, Roskomnadzor can either partially or completely block the information resource.
The authors of the law, including United Russia deputies Alexander Khinshtein and Anton Gorelkin, Communist Party deputy Alexander Yushchenko and Senator Alexei Pushkov, explained the initiative by complaints from RIA Novosti, RT and Krym-24 TV channels about restrictions from Western IT platforms.
Khinshtein himself, commenting on the new norm at the stage of the bill, compared it with “nuclear weapons” and called it a “deterrence mechanism.” However, even then he admitted that it was with the help of this law that a complete blocking of, for example, YouTube could be implemented in Russia.
How the slowdown will affect Facebook
The monthly audience of Facebook in January 2022 among Russians over 12 years old on desktops and mobile devices (both the application and the web version are taken into account) was 51.8 million, according to Mediascope’s Cross Web project. On average, each user spent 15 minutes a day in the app.
LiveInternet founder German Klimenko says that Roskomnadzor “instead of punishing Facebook for blocking Russian media, is punishing Russian users.”
“If you make a decision, then it must have a reaction: for example, Facebook will unblock four media outlets. If Roskomnadzor limited advertising payments to the company, it would be noticeable for it, and users would not experience any inconvenience,” he comments. At the same time, Klymenko drew attention to the fact that now the complication of the work of Facebook will be of little interest to people, everyone is following the news in Ukraine. “We don’t know yet what format the restrictions will take. Roskomnadzor leaves a kind of backlash with such a warning so that the partners hear and have time to either change their mind or somehow realize the depth of their guilt, ”said the creator of LiveInternet.
In general, he believes that the slowdown of the social network will be similar to the situation with Twitter. “Most likely, access to the site will be difficult in the form of limiting the download of photos and videos,” Klymenko suggests. “If this is a variant of Twitter, then none of the users will leave the social network. Moreover, users can use VPN. For us, the share of Facebook’s revenue from Russian users is quite large, but the main thing is content, the ability to have all the information,” he says.
The technical director of Roskomsvoboda, Stanislav Shakirov, noted that the actions of Roskomnadzor are similar to the reaction to the blocking by the social network of those Russian media that describe the military operation in Ukraine from an angle favorable to the Russian authorities. He also suggested that the same measures that were applied to Twitter would be applied to Facebook. “When a user opens the social network, they will see a slowdown in its loading and a slowdown in the loading of videos. For the social network itself, this will not be critical, since the number of Russian users is not so large. Another thing is that Facebook users probably already have plugins or VPNs that will allow them to bypass the blocking,” Shakirov argues. He believes that there will be no outflow of users from this site, since “there is nowhere to flow to”: “There are users on Facebook who either do not want or cannot use Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki, so they have to go somewhere especially there is no point”.