Moscow - The Federal Service for Supervision in Telecom, Information Technologies and Mass Communications (Roskomnadzor) blocked 85 websites with extremist content since the beginning of the year, Roskomnadzor Head Alexander Zharov said at a media forum in St. Petersburg on April 23. "The prosecutor's office gave us information on 189 websites - 85 of them have been blocked and remaining 104 deleted extremism-related information. Not a single mass media outlet was among the websites that were blocked," Zharov said.
Roskomnadzor analyzed 257,700 media reports in 2013 and 70,000 in 2014, Zharov said. “This year we issued seven warnings over inciting national and religious enmity and fascist propaganda,” he said.
According to polls, the views of Internet users, who are group members on social networks, become more radical, Zharov said. “This leads to real crimes,” he said.
“The Right Sector [in Ukraine] – its history was created on social networks, namely it was there that the radicalization of the organization occurred. We have managed to agree so that Facebook deletes the community dedicated to the Right Sector, Vkontakte has recently deleted a group on fascism with 35,000 members,” the official said.
Zharov have recently proposed the All-Russia People’s Front to introduce administrative penalties for dishonest mass media outlets, which deliberately report radical materials. Such mass media outlets should not have the opportunity to register as a new mass media outlet in the future, he said.
