Roskomnadzor obliged search engines to label Wikipedia as a violator of laws

Roskomnadzor has decided to oblige search engines to label Wikipedia in search results as a violator of Russian laws. The department reported this on its website.

The supervisory service explained the measure taken by the fact that the Internet encyclopedia does not remove “illegal information,” including “fakes” about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Search engines will be required to label them until Wikipedia complies with Roskomnadzor’s requirements.

The Wikimedia Foundation, which owns the encyclopedia, has already been fined by Russian courts a total of five million rubles under the article on failure to remove prohibited information (Part 2 of Article 13.41 of the Administrative Code).

At the end of April, the Wikimedia Foundation was fined due to articles about the progress of the war in Ukraine, victims in Bucha and the destruction of a hospital and theater in Mariupol. In May, Roskomnadzor demanded that the English-language articles “2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine” and “Rashism” be removed.

On July 21, Executive Director of Wikimedia RU Stanislav Kozlovsky told RBC that Roskomnadzor’s decision was not related to “illegal information,” but to the fact that the parent company Wikimedia Foundation did not open a representative office in Russia.

• The Wikimedia Foundation is an American non-profit organization that owns an online encyclopedia and maintains the infrastructure for a number of wiki projects, including Wikipedia.
• At the request of Roskomnadzor, similar markings are applied by the Russian search engine and the company of the same name, Yandex. Google does not make such notes. On July 18, a court in Moscow fined the company 21 billion rubles under the article on repeated failure to delete prohibited information (Part 5 of Article 13.41 of the Administrative Code).
• After the start of the war with Ukraine, Roskomnadzor demanded that the media write about the invasion only with reference to official Russian sources. Journalists were also prohibited from calling the “special operation” an attack, invasion, or declaration of war. Otherwise, the supervisory authority threatened with blocking and fines of up to five million rubles.