Facebook faces a fine of a tenth of its revenue in Russia. The corresponding protocol plans to draw up and hand over to representatives of the social network Roskomnadzor for repeated failure to delete prohibited information, the press service of the regulator told Vedomosti.
On October 4, Facebook representatives were summoned to draw up the protocol. Then the document will be sent to the court, which will determine the amount of the fine. Since we are talking about a repeated violation of the law in terms of the removal of prohibited information, Facebook may be ordered to pay a fine in the amount of “from 1/20 to 1/10 of the annual turnover of the Internet company,” the service representative said.
Facebook did not respond to the publication's request.
Since the beginning of the year, Russian courts have repeatedly fined large Internet companies, including Twitter, Facebook, Google and TikTok, but so far the fines have not been so tangible and amounted to no more than 20 million rubles. They were issued either for non-deletion of prohibited information (Article 13.41 of the Administrative Code), or for storing data of Russian users abroad (Article 13.11 of the Administrative Code).
For example, in total, all fines awarded during this period in Russia to Facebook for not deleting prohibited information amounted to 66 million rubles, Twitter – 38.4 million rubles, Google – 26 million rubles. In cases of localization of user data, Facebook and Twitter were fined 15 million and 17 million rubles in August. respectively, noted in Roskomnadzor.
According to Art. 13.41 Administrative Code, social networks and providers are obliged to remove pages with prohibited information at the request of the authorities. Various types of information fall under this category, including the sale of fake certificates and diplomas, casino advertisements, and information deemed extremist by a court. In addition, the obligation to delete pages with calls to extremism, child pornography and information on drug use is spelled out separately in the article. For repeated failure to delete such information, a larger fine is provided – not a tenth, but a fifth of the company's turnover.
According to Roskomnadzor, all at the moment the administration of Facebook and Instagram has not removed more than 2 thousand illegal materials, “including those containing child pornography, suicidal, pro-narcotic, extremist content.” Despite the fact that such publications, the failure of which could lead to a larger fine, were also found on Facebook, the corresponding proceedings in Roskomnadzor have not yet been initiated, said a source familiar with the course of the case.
Since the beginning of the year, the department has drawn up 19 protocols against Facebook under Art. 13.41 of the Administrative Code of the Russian Federation for failure to remove prohibited content. The court imposed fines on the company in the total amount of about 70 million rubles, of which court decisions amounted to 43 million rubles. have already entered into force. “The Facebook administration did not pay the fines,” said Roskomnadzor.
Facebook's revenue, according to the company, in 2020 worldwide amounted to $ 85.9 billion. Revenues separately by country, including Russia, she does not disclose.
According to Finam analyst Leonid Delitsyn, Russian revenue could be about 8-12 billion rubles. In this case, the amount of the fine can range from 0.4–0.6 billion rubles, if the court applies a rate of 1/20 of the turnover in Russia, to 0.8–1.2 billion rubles. at the highest possible rate.
However, it will not be easy to collect a fine in Russia, said Alexander Zhuravlev, chairman of the digital economy commission of the Moscow branch of the Russian Bar Association. The main problem is that a number of foreign IT companies, including Facebook and Twitter, do not have an official representation in the country.
This problem should be solved by the adopted law “on landing” of foreign IT companies, which President Vladimir Putin signed in early July. According to this law, from January 1, 2022, foreign IT companies will have to create their branches and representative offices in Russia. The requirement will apply to social networks with a daily audience of more than 500 thousand Russian users, provided that these social networks publish content in Russian, and advertising is directed to the Russian audience.
In the opposite case, a number of measures can be applied to companies. Among them – a ban on the distribution of advertisements for the resource in Russia, restriction of money transfers and acceptance of payments from Russian citizens and companies, as well as partial or complete restriction of access to the resource.
