For two years in Russia, almost 85 thousand “drug” pages and sites were included in the register of prohibited information

For 2 years, as a result of joint activities of Roskomnadzor and the Ministry of Internal Affairs, almost 85 thousand materials with the propaganda of drug use were removed or blocked. This was announced today by the press service of Roskomnadzor.

To be more precise, in 2020-2021, 84,569 websites and their individual pages containing information on drug trafficking were entered into the Russian Unified Register of Prohibited Information.

According to Roskomnadzor, 4,179 of them are user pages and channels of the Telegram messenger, as well as 10,498 specialized sites.

In addition, if prohibited information is revealed, Roskomnadzor turns to the administration of Internet sites, such as social networks, in order to delete such information promptly, without entering it into the register. In total, in 2020-2021, 129,125 links to drug content were removed in this way.

The department also reminded once again that for failure to delete information about the distribution of drugs at the request of Roskomnadzor, the owner of the site and the hosting provider may be brought to administrative responsibility. The penalty for the first violation is from 3 to 8 million rubles. For a repeated violation, a turnover fine is established (from one tenth to one fifth of the annual proceeds).

Since the beginning of 2021, the following companies have been brought to administrative responsibility by Russian courts for failure to remove various types of prohibited information:

• Facebook was fined 70 million rubles,
• Twitter – 38.4 million rubles;
• Telegram – 35 million rubles;
• Google – by 32.5 million rubles;
• TikTok – by 4.1 million rubles;
• Classmates – 4 million rubles;
• Vkontakte – 3 million rubles.