Russia adopts law further restricting internet freedom for bloggers

Russia on Friday introduced a new law that further restricts internet freedom. The new rule means, among other things, that bloggers with more than three thousand visitors daily must register from now on.

The Russian parliament passed President Vladimir Putin’s law earlier this year. It states that bloggers with many readers fall under the same rules as major news media, such as newspapers. As a result, they must register with the telecom watchdog and are no longer allowed to operate anonymously. Moreover, they are responsible for the information they publish, with all the consequences that entails.

Failure to comply with the law will result in fines of up to 100,000 euros and closure of the weblog in question. According to the BBC, there are already “many popular bloggers” looking for ways to keep the number of unique visitors below 3,000. They also look at ways to avoid the statistics in general.

In addition to visitor registration, the new law also requires sites that enable content posting, such as blogs and forums, and search engines to keep records of who posts what. They have to keep that data for six months and, moreover, they have to keep it on Russian territory. That way, the authorities can access the data.

The Russian government has been tightening its surveillance of social media and information technology as a whole lately. Putin, for example, recently signed a law that requires internet companies, including Facebook and Google, to store data from Russians within Russia. Furthermore, the government is attempting a tender to undo the anonymization of the Tor network and, finally, Russia wants to see the source code of Apple software to see whether it contains backdoors for espionage.