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Congratulations! You're now an official Russian media outlet!
Russia This Week: New Laws to Rein in Blogosphere
April 23, 2014
1352 GMT: Russian parliamentarians have passed in the third [final] reading a law equating popular bloggers in social networks with mass media, gazeta.ru reported. Any blogger who has more than 3,000 readers will have to register as a media outlet and follow Russia’s restrictive press law, which includes regulations on elections, prohibitions on disseminating “extremist” materials, and identification of audience age.
Russia’s very lively blogosphere has been roiling for weeks in anticipation of the law, with people bewildered as to how they will define the “3,000 readers” rule. Last week, the Russian search engine Yandex.ru announced that it was pulling its ranking system and badges with audience counters, evidently to avoid having to address the question of defining traffic for blogs. Yandex explained the removal as motivated by the need to clean up outdated systems and the increase in the use of social media links instead of search to find blogs. To be sure, this is a trend all over the Internet in many countries, and hit counters have been made obsolete with other means of measuring readership, but Yandex may simply want to avoid having to serve as a punitive arm of the government — for the sake of its own survival. Yandex has been critical of legislation to control the Internet.
Roskomnadzor, the state agency that monitors communications and essentially serves as a censor, plans to start a special blog register, and for those who fail to register and comply with the law, fines up to 300,000 rubles ($8,400) and 500,000 ($14,000) for repeat offenders will be imposed.
Sofya Ivanova, PR director for Rambler&Co, owners of LiveJournal told gazeta.ru her company was pushing back against the legislative action:
“LiveJournal, Inc. believes that the industry does not need any additional regulation, since all the points that are provided in the new law are reflected already in legislation; that is the law on libel, the rules for election campaigning and the rules banning distribution of extremist information. All of these norms are already in effect.”
Bloggers have not yet received any government guidance on how to count their readers, and the threat of more scrutiny under vaguely-worded laws like the ban on “extremism” is likely to drive bloggers to services outside Russia, Yelena Bordyugova, a marketer for the company Blogun, told gazeta.ru.
...
Read the April 22, 2014 segment, as it explains even more.
http://www.interpretermag.com/category/blog/
April 23, 2014
1352 GMT: Russian parliamentarians have passed in the third [final] reading a law equating popular bloggers in social networks with mass media, gazeta.ru reported. Any blogger who has more than 3,000 readers will have to register as a media outlet and follow Russia’s restrictive press law, which includes regulations on elections, prohibitions on disseminating “extremist” materials, and identification of audience age.
Russia’s very lively blogosphere has been roiling for weeks in anticipation of the law, with people bewildered as to how they will define the “3,000 readers” rule. Last week, the Russian search engine Yandex.ru announced that it was pulling its ranking system and badges with audience counters, evidently to avoid having to address the question of defining traffic for blogs. Yandex explained the removal as motivated by the need to clean up outdated systems and the increase in the use of social media links instead of search to find blogs. To be sure, this is a trend all over the Internet in many countries, and hit counters have been made obsolete with other means of measuring readership, but Yandex may simply want to avoid having to serve as a punitive arm of the government — for the sake of its own survival. Yandex has been critical of legislation to control the Internet.
Roskomnadzor, the state agency that monitors communications and essentially serves as a censor, plans to start a special blog register, and for those who fail to register and comply with the law, fines up to 300,000 rubles ($8,400) and 500,000 ($14,000) for repeat offenders will be imposed.
Sofya Ivanova, PR director for Rambler&Co, owners of LiveJournal told gazeta.ru her company was pushing back against the legislative action:
“LiveJournal, Inc. believes that the industry does not need any additional regulation, since all the points that are provided in the new law are reflected already in legislation; that is the law on libel, the rules for election campaigning and the rules banning distribution of extremist information. All of these norms are already in effect.”
Bloggers have not yet received any government guidance on how to count their readers, and the threat of more scrutiny under vaguely-worded laws like the ban on “extremism” is likely to drive bloggers to services outside Russia, Yelena Bordyugova, a marketer for the company Blogun, told gazeta.ru.
...
Read the April 22, 2014 segment, as it explains even more.
“Foreign Internet services of electronic mail and the exchange of instant messages will be obliged along with Russian companies to ensure storage of data about user activity for a period of half a year, and obliged to keep it on Russian territory. This follows form the text of an “anti-terrorist package” of laws which the State Duma has passed Tuesday in the third [final] reading. In the evaluation of experts, if foreign companies refuse to comply with this law, access to their services in Russia will be blocked.”
http://www.interpretermag.com/category/blog/
Now I hope no one will spoil my misunderstandings about this with long and tedious explanations. I'm sure that it applies only to Russian citizens, but since the law seems to be designed to ferret out those who would pretend not to be one, I'd say anyone who's garnered 3,000 views on DU should accept the official media outlet designation and pony up the cash. We're all dogs here anyway, and DU membership drives were never so much fun.
There's another issue in that Alexa says 0.7% of DU views are from Russia, out of 2.7M page views per day, so I'd say they have a fair claim that the DU admins need to add a Russian server. Don't worry, we can sell the naming rights.
Other questions, much more serious:
Does "extremism" apply to The Lounge?
If we all sign up with a Russian proxy, can we flood FR or CC for a day to get them named as Official Russian Media?
Are they mad because RT can't be a source in LBN?
11 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
but there's always the chance they wouldn't get the joke, which wouldn't be good.
Come to think of it, with the bans for posting "extremist information", whatever that would be, I wonder if you could get ban-hammered from all of Russia for hyping chemtrails? Now that's a PM I'd want to see framed. 
is just a xenophobic poopyhead!!!!!
Waaaah!
Thought I might as well get that outta the way early!!!
and 
for the irony-impaired...!
