The bill on news aggregators was approved in the second reading

The State Duma intends to oblige news aggregators to prevent the distribution of materials with public calls for terrorist activities and "other extremist materials."

On June 8, 2016, the State Duma approved in the second reading a draft law on regulating the work of news aggregators on the Internet. On June 10, the bill was adopted in the third reading.

The bill provides, among other things, that the owners of news aggregators are obliged to prevent their use for the purpose of committing crimes, divulging state secrets and " distributing materials containing public calls for terrorist activities or publicly justifying terrorism, other extremist materials, as well as materials promoting pornography, cult of violence and cruelty, and materials containing obscene language ".

They are also planned to be obligated not to allow the dissemination of news " in order to discredit a citizen or certain categories of citizens on the grounds of gender, age, race or nationality, language, attitude to religion, profession, place of residence and work, as well as in connection with their political convictions " , verify the accuracy of publicly significant information and prevent the dissemination of falsified publicly significant information and information that violates the law about private life. At the same time, the owner of the aggregator will not bear responsibility for the dissemination of unreliable news only if they literally reproduce the messages of mass media registered in Russia.

The functions of maintaining a register of news aggregators, similar to the register of bloggers, are planned to be entrusted to Roskomnadzor. Aggregators are invited to recognize services with a daily audience of 1 million people or more. They will have to store the disseminated news with information about their sources for six months.

If the authorized state bodies find inaccurate information or information distributed in violation of the law in the aggregator, they will have to contact Roskomnadzor through the form on its website, attaching a court decision or their own decision. Roskomnadzor must send an order to the owner of the aggregator to delete the information within 24 hours. For failure to fulfill the obligation to store news or to comply with the instructions of Roskomnadzor to remove inaccurate information, administrative liability is provided in the form of a fine.

Sources

• Bill No. 1004188-6. On Amendments to the Federal Law "On Information, Information Technologies and Information Protection" and the Code of the Russian Federation on Administrative Offenses (in terms of streamlining the dissemination of information on the Internet) // Automated system for ensuring the state activities of the State Duma. 2016. June 8.