Simonyan Says Russian IT Giants Should Create Something 'Cooler' Than Western Platforms

MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 01st December, 2020) The government cannot defend Russia's information sovereignty on its own, so national IT giants should step in and come up with platforms that will be unparalleled in the West, Sputnik and RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan said on Tuesday.

"Efforts of the state, even if they are exhaustive in terms of legislation, in terms of law enforcement practice, in terms of fighting improper, wrong and unlawful competition - even if we magically defeat all this, as we defeated fascism - are not enough, because we need our IT giants to create something unspeakably cooler," Simonyan said.

The East, in her opinion, has already "leapt far ahead" of YouTube, Instagram or WhatsApp. As an example, she pointed to Chinese platforms.

"We need to do this and join hands with the state, and then in a year or two at most, we will forget how we were rightly concerned and worried about the fact that our country's information space and information sovereignty had been lost," Simonyan added.

The editor-in-chief spoke at a roundtable titled "Two-Color World: Struggle for Truth" at the Rossiya Segodnya International Information Agency.