Facebook can open a representative office in Russia: "An important market for us"

The world's largest Facebook social network does not exclude the opening of a representative office in Russia, but the company has no specific plans yet, Facebook representative in Russia Ekaterina Skorobogatova told reporters. Previously, the company called for this by the Russian authorities, several times this year threatened to block the site.

"Facebook works in a huge number of countries without representative offices. It is still impossible for us to open representative offices in all countries of the world as our users as a company. However, Russia is an important market for us, and we think about what to do for further development on it," Skorobogatova, not excluding that one of the options for working with Russia in the future may be the opening of a representative office.

According to Skorobogatova, which quotes the Digit.ru website, the lack of a full representation in Russia does not interfere with social networks to work with Russian authorities in normal mode. "Like other major Internet companies, we work absolutely normally with the same Roskomnadzor. The requests of Roskomnadzor as a whole comply with the rules adopted on Facebook itself," said the representative of the social network.

The Facebook global audience is about 1.2 billion users, the number of the audience in Russia does not disclose the social network.

The issue of the need to create a representative office of Facebook in Russia has repeatedly raised by the Russian authorities, it recalls ITAR-TASS. One of the last episodes was the situation with advertising of smoking mixtures , due to which Facebook could be blocked in Russia.

In mid -September, social networks recorded the appearance of smoking mixtures on their pages. The resource offered several types of products available in Moscow, Odessa, Kyiv and Krasnodar. The phone indicated for ordering drugs was "temporarily unavailable." Facebook called the incident "technical failure".

After this advertisement, the project of the LDPR Party "Internet without drugs" sent a request to Roskomnadzor with a request to investigate the incident and block the resource in Russia for a period of 90 days. With a similar request, a member of the Federation Council Committee on Science, Education, Culture and Information Policy Ruslan Gattarov addressed the head of the FSKN Viktor Ivanov. And Roskomnadzor announced that the social network is really facing a blocking: one of the pages of the portal fell into the register of prohibited sites.

Later, the Facebook administration said that the content, in connection with which notifications were received about the need to delete prohibited information, was eliminated.

And in March, on one of the pages of the resource, materials were discovered that the expert commission recognized the call for suicide .

Senator Gattarov then noted that such a problem would not have arisen if the company had effective management in Russia and a full -fledged representation worked. According to him, the opening of the company's representative office in Russia would ensure a quick response to supervisory claims such as Roskomnadzor.