Any cook can become a foreigner

It seems that Russian senators are again attacking YouTube

Senator Andrei Klimov said that the status of a foreign agent in the near future can be extended not only to the media, but also to individuals who disseminate information on the Internet. Corresponding amendments will be made to the bill on the introduction of new fines for the media on the eve of his second reading. Klimov, who heads the Commission of the Council for the Protection of State Sovereignty, notes that not only bloggers will fall under the actions of the law, "but even at least anyone - any person, private entrepreneur, pensioner, housewife." In order for the Ministry of Justice to be interested in “any person”, he must receive funding from abroad and inform something “illegal” on his page. According to the current legislation, foreign agents must be marked in a certain way, and in case of violation of the rules for registration, “agent” threatens large fines. Until now, this practice has been extended exclusively to the organization.

At first glance, Klimov’s fantasies about foreign householders are another evidence of the incompetence of the authorities, especially in the situation where they try to regulate the Internet that they themselves do not use. From the statement of the senator it follows that bloggers are a special social group or profession for him, and that this category of citizens does not intersect, for example, with entrepreneurs or pensioners. The maintenance of the register of foreign agents by the Ministry of Justice, in turn, recalls the shamefully failed attempt to maintain the state register of “information distributors”, which only a few hundred propagandists managed to register, after which this norm of the law was officially canceled.

However, in reality, the cunning of the senatorial mind works more complicated. For some reason, the Russian authorities still do not know how to directly say that they introduce censorship and forbid citizens to express any points of view that are different from the official ones. Therefore, they, referring to the “international experience”, allegedly gained in this matter, endlessly expand the prohibitions associated with the status of foreign agents.

This rule will not be able to work on the country's scale, but who needs to be attracted.

Foreign agents are another of the meanings of the introduction of a “sovereign Runet”, where the right of the word has exclusively bosses. First, they created a legislative framework for censorship, now they introduce unbearable rules for everyone who spoke on the Internet.

On the example of the FBC, we saw that you can find yourself in the list of foreign agents after an unknown foreigner unknown to you will transfer any amount of money to your account: the Spaniard, who did not speak Russian, substituted Navalny. Klimov’s new law is already very useful at this level if you want to intimidate people properly. It will be enough to transfer to popular bloggers a hundred rubles from Belarus or Kazakhstan so that they have to shut up for a long time.

But the main direction of the attack in this case, it seems, is connected with YouTube, an American video hosting that poisons the existence of its popularity in Russia - its audience is comparable to the audience of federal channels of TV. Political bloggers on YouTube receive little money from an American company due to advertising - about a dollar for every thousand views. Any of them can be recognized as a foreign agent and offer to publish videos solely on resources located in Russian jurisdiction in order to avoid such risks.

What can I say, on the eve of the adoption of a new law on foreign agents, do not forget to issue a subscription to the “new” paper.