The Tagansky District Court of Moscow ordered the Telegram messenger to pay a five million rubles fine due to the failure to delete content about unauthorized actions in support of opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Promotions were held on January 23 and 31.
The service was found guilty of two administrative offenses, with a fine for each of 2.5 million rubles. This was announced on Wednesday, May 12, by the press secretary of the Tagansky District Court. Telegram has two months to pay the fine.
Roskomnadzor stated that in connection with “failure to delete or untimely deletion of information that involved teenagers in taking part in unauthorized mass events”, protocols were drawn up for various social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, TikTok.
On March 4, Mail.ru LLC was fined 4 million rubles for untimely deletion of calls on the Odnoklassniki social network. On May 12, a fine of 1.5 million rubles was imposed on the VKontakte social network. On May 25, the court will consider the protocols drawn up on Facebook, on May 27 – on Twitter, and on June 1 – on the Google search engine. They face fines in the amount of 20 million rubles or more.
Alexei Navalny was detained on January 17 after returning from Germany, where he was undergoing rehabilitation after being poisoned with a chemical agent from the Novichok group. On January 23 and 31, rallies in support of Navalny were held in many cities of Russia, which ended in mass arrests. A few days later, the court replaced Navalny's suspended sentence in the real Yves Rocher case. In October 2017, the European Court of Human Rights, which was considering a complaint in this case, ruled in favor of the Navalny brothers and ordered the Russian state to pay fines of many thousands.
