On Friday a court in Moscow, Russia, gave Google a fine of 7.2 billion rubles (86 million euros) and Meta, the company that controls Facebook and Instagram, a fine of 1.99 billion rubles (approx. 24 million euros), for not removing content considered illegal in Russia.
Roskomnadzor, the Russian federal communications authority, explained in a statement that the fines were imposed due to Google and Meta's failure to remove content that incites religious hatred, drug use and propaganda. opinions of extremist and terrorist organizations. The fines were calculated by the court on the basis of the two companies' annual revenues in Russia, and amount to about 8 percent of the total. At the moment, Google has not responded to the court decision and has only said it will study the sentence file carefully; Meta, on the other hand, has not yet commented on the fine.
The court did not specify what Google and Meta did not delete, and only communicated their number: 2,600,000 content from Google and more than 2,000 from Facebook and Instagram. Although the contents considered illegal by the Moscow court have not been disclosed, according to many Russian experts, the aim of the fine is above all the political movement headed by Alexei Navalny, the main opponent of President Vladimir Putin, sentenced in February to three and a half years in prison for violating probation, an accusation that he and supporters believe is spurious and due solely to his political activism.
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In June, a Moscow court had declared the organizations founded by Navalny illegal and extremist: the sentence particularly affected the FBK Anti-Corruption Foundation, the most famous of the Navalny organizations, which had published the well-known investigations into the corruption of the Russian ruling class. The ruling had effectively made it impossible for the Navalny movement to operate in Russia, given that Russian law provides for up to ten years in prison for those who participate in or finance organizations deemed “extremist”, equated to known terrorist groups such as al Qaeda.
Many of the videos produced by Navalny and his organizations to expose corruption in Russian politics are still accessible on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, and it is plausible that in Friday's ruling the Moscow court is referring precisely to this content.
However, it is not the first time that in recent months the Russian authorities have tried to thwart the activities of large technology companies for political purposes. In September, on the occasion of the parliamentary elections, almost all the candidates who had any chance of undermining the government parties had been ousted from the vote. However, the Navalny movement had created an app where there was a list of candidates, in opposition or not aligned with the government, on which to converge all the votes against Putin. A few weeks after its creation, however, the government had obtained that the app be deleted from the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store.
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