MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 19th November, 2020) Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of the Rossiya Segodnya international news agency and the RT broadcaster, on Thursday expressed skepticism over the effectiveness of a new bill that will penalize censorship of Russian media, saying that penalty prescribed under the bill was too low.
Earlier in the day, the bill on sanctions that foreign online platforms would face over censorship against Russian media outlets was submitted to the lower house of the Russian parliament. According to one of the bill authors, Anton Gorelkin, foreign online platforms would face sanctions up to three million rubles ($39,420) for various forms of censorship against Russian media outlets and Russians as well as restriction of access to socially significant information on the Russian territory.
"Russia will finally punish all those Googles for censoring Russians. That said, penalties are laughable, three million rubles at most. For a hypothetical [and non-hypothetical] Google this is like a drop in the bucket. But thanks for at least that, of course," Simonyan wrote on Telegram.
Russia's communications watchdog, Roskomnadzor, will be running a list of owners of websites that are involved in censorship. Under the draft legislation, sanctions would be lifted after an online platform abandons censorship and informs Roskomnadzor on this step.
