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On the other hand, in order to illuminate something, one must take care of distribution. Here, too, there are difficulties.
Distribution problem
The toolkit for state regulation of information exchange is growing. It is aimed not only at the media, but also at platforms, especially foreign ones. In March 2021, we saw the technical aspect of such regulation: slowing down Twitter for refusing to remove all tweets that officials did not like. At the end of the year, we were shown the economic aspect – turnover fines platforms for the same non-deletion of prohibited information.
This trend will intensify in 2022. Law 236-FZ on the so-called “landing”, adopted in July 2021, introduces the concept of “activities of foreign persons on the Internet on the territory of the Russian Federation”.
In short, any foreign company with a daily audience of more than 500,000 Russian users that distributes information in Russian, or shows ads for Russians, or processes information about them, or accepts funds from them, must establish a branch and comply with Russian laws. In particular, delete prohibited information upon request.
This law is written first of all for Google, Apple and other IT giants and will come into force in 2022. Some corporations (Apple, Likee, Spotify) have already partially met the regulators. The reaction of the rest is watched with increasing tension by both the authorities and the users of the platforms.
The pressure of the Russian authorities on the Internet giants is constantly growing. Each of them reacts differently. For example, for several years Microsoft has not tried to challenge the blocking of LinkedIn and transfers software sales in Russia to resellers in order to avoid risks. Apple reduces the number of data processed in Russia. Google takes out of the country employees who are threatened with criminal prosecution. Telegram pretends that in the interests of product development it is necessary to block opposition bots and shifts the responsibility for this to Google and Apple.
In the future, the law on landing may also apply to several large independent media outlets, especially since 500,000 Russian users is clearly a bar that can be lowered by law, covering more sites. So far, this is a long way off, but the difficulties of the platforms are seriously affecting the media. The fact is that the media rarely bring big money to platforms, but they cause additional problems. Since February 2021, platforms have had to search for “extremism” on their own. Since December, they have been helped in this by an additional monitoring system that Roskomnadzor has begun to implement.
This alignment is a huge problem for independent media. At any moment, they risk losing contact with the audience on external sites due to the blocking of pages, communities, channels. It is easy to predict that 2022 will be a year of fragmentation and the creation of separate user communities. They will be based on chats in instant messengers, on the basis of mailing lists and other technologies that are little dependent on a particular site.
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