How I was forbidden to joke

About the legal proceedings due to the blocking of a tweet in Russia

Last November, the editor-in-chief of TJournal, then still working at Lenta.ru, wrote a comic, provocative tweet to test the absurdity of the law on the register of prohibited sites. But what happened next around this tweet turned out to be much more absurd than initially expected.

Out of court

The night of November 1, 2012 seemed special to me, like dozens of my friends. In Russia, a registry of banned sites has begun to operate, ostensibly aimed at protecting children from pages with instructions on drug use, suicide propaganda and child pornography. In fact, for the sake of the well-being of children, it was intended throughout the country to pretend that this information did not exist.

The main absurdity here is not even in the categories of prohibited information themselves (but propaganda of suicide? wtf?), but in the fact that the law itself and its application in practice were as undeveloped as possible. A simple example: a government decree describing how the register of banned sites should, in principle, work, appeared almost on the last day.

So, the night of November 1 seemed magical to many of those who are at least a little concerned about the fate of the Runet. Everyone expected that sites, like houses in “Fight Club,” would fall down one after another. Nothing of the kind, of course, happened: the houses gradually fell down over the following months.

As a person who actively followed the fate of this law, I wanted to make sure that in practice it was as absurd as in theory. I didn’t want to set anyone up, let alone set myself up too much, so I wrote a deliberately idiotic tweet about suicide. I published it, received a dozen retweets and happily forgot about it.

No one would probably have remembered the tweet if one of my readers—also “for an experiment”—had not sent a complaint to Roskomnadzor. Already on November 2, Rospotrebnadzor met and decided that the tweet contained suicide propaganda, instilled in children a frivolous attitude towards such a terrible topic, and should be blocked in Russia.

According to the law, after Rospotrebnadzor made a decision to block and transferred it to Roskomnadzor, the latter must notify the site management about the incident. If the resource administration does not remove prohibited content within a couple of days, Roskomnadzor should already include the entire site, including its IP address, in the register of prohibited sites. From this moment on, Russian providers are required to block access to this site.

With Twitter, fortunately, Roskomnadzor was afraid to act so rudely, so for a long time it looked for opportunities to contact the management of the site. I, like everyone else, learned about Rospotrebnadzor’s decision only four months later: in March 2013, I received an email from the service administration, which stated that the Russian authorities had long had complaints about my record. I shared this on (well, where else) Twitter, others noticed the incident, and I decided to write “Rain” about it. As a result, I had to write about my own adventures on Lenta.ru.

At the time of the first notification, the tweet was still available, so the Streisand effect was not long in coming: the retweet count per day grew from a measly 10 to almost two hundred. And this is not to mention the fact that the media one way or another told the meaning of the controversial recording.

A couple of days later, Twitter sent a second letter saying that the tweet would still have to be blocked. A year earlier, the company introduced a feature that allows it to restrict access to individual tweets in individual countries - simply because different countries have different legislation, and these “crutches” allow them to comply with local bans as flexibly as possible. On March 14, Russian users were deprived of what seemed to be my best joke.

Soon the legendary media manager Anton Nosik drew attention to the case of blocking. He wrote on his blog about this case, expressing a number of unflattering epithets about the body that made this decision, and providing a screenshot of the banned tweet. Five days later, Nosik’s post was also blocked on Russian territory. And the record is still in this state.

In a court

As I already said, the provocative tweet was written as an experiment designed to test the strength of the mechanism of the registry of prohibited sites. From the moment of its publication until the moment of blocking, Roskomnadzor, Rospotrebnadzor and the Federal Drug Control Service have already managed to demonstrate the wonders of balancing act more than once, blocking either comics, or LiveJournal posts with reportage photographs, or cartoonish social advertising, which in the country of origin helped to greatly reduce the number of accidents on the railway .

The law offers only one way to appeal decisions on blocking pages: the court. Since without this the experiment would have been considered incomplete, I contacted the human rights organization “Agora” and, together with its lawyer Damir Gainutdinov, filed a complaint against the decision of Rospotrebnadzor, demanding that it be declared illegal, since there is no propaganda of suicide in that recording. A rather protracted and no less ridiculous process than the law itself began.

A preliminary hearing on our complaint was scheduled only for August - the Tverskoy Court, which considered the claim, is traditionally considered to be very busy. At the very first meeting with Judge Komissarov, a rather absurd conversation took place : having heard that I considered my right to freedom of speech violated, he sarcastically asked where I got the idea that the Twitter in question was even mine. An attempt to explain that there is my photograph on it and, in general, “if you want, I’ll write it right now,” did not work: Komissarov demanded more substantial evidence.

I had to bring printouts of the Twitter settings page and a letter from the service itself, received upon registration, to the next meeting in October. It worked, although we were afraid that the whole dispute would end on this formal basis.

In October, the meeting turned out to be even shorter: women from government departments brought printouts of the administrative panel of the registry of prohibited sites and refused to give us copies. I had to seek the right to familiarize myself with the documents through a judge and again postpone the outcome. This time, until December, Komissarov himself went on vacation.

The meeting on the appointed day began an hour late. My lawyer Damir, like an ace from his sleeve, pulled out a linguistic examination in which a seemingly obvious thing was written in scientific language: that the phrase in the tweet is an oxymoron, designed to express an attitude towards the current situation, and not to call for anything. And that, due to the deliberate contradiction of common sense in the text, it is clearly considered a comical expression.

The judge, listening to excerpts from the experts' opinions, demonstratively fiddles with the laptop: obviously, something in it did not work - he angrily lifted it from one side to the other.

The law, the lawyer continued, guarantees the free flow of information, allowing restrictions only within the framework of a legitimate purpose. And although the authorities’ goal—to protect children from harmful information—is legitimate, achieving it by blocking a humorous tweet is obviously unlawful, Damir concluded.

During further disputes with Rospotrebnadzor and Roskomnadzor (a representative of the first referred to three expert opinions, and an employee of the second insisted that the department had a purely technical function - to enter pages into the register), the judge continued to carefully study the screen of his laptop.

He was only interested in the moment with the very examination that recognized the tweet as a joke. He suddenly began to find out how experts examined the tweet, if at that time it was already blocked in Russia. I had to convey to the judge that the law is so imperfect that any even more or less savvy person can easily cope with bypassing the blocking.

However, representatives of both departments (as well as the judge himself) hastened to declare that in this case it is not the law itself and its imperfections that are being discussed, but a specific case of its application. They could not understand what my rights were violated by the blocking. The phrases “right to freedom of speech” and “right to freedom of information”, even after repeated repetition, did not have any effect on lawyers.

At the very end of the meeting, a representative of Roskomnadzor decided to put on a one-person show, saying that “how often our jokes can be perceived differently by other people.” For some reason, he made an analogy with drugs, offering to evaluate the share of a joke in the formulation “use drugs, it’s fun,” and the judge happily supported him, noting that, in his opinion, you can also “make jokes about your mother.” I didn’t want to respond to these attacks: the result was more important.

The court retired to the deliberation room, came out a couple of minutes later and quickly read the decision: to refuse the complaint. The first round of the experiment is over: a tweet added to the “black list” will remain on it for now. Even despite the fact that tens of thousands of times more people learn about it (and have already learned about it). Just to protect the children.

Suing is fun
Sultan Suleimanov,
TJournal

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