Roskomnadzor listed resources required to provide data on daily attendance

Photo: E. Reasonable / Vedomosti

Roskomnadzor announced a list of resources that, until February 21, inclusive, must provide data on average daily attendance. First of all, it concerns aggregators Yandex.News , Google News , Mail.ru News , Rambler News , Mass Media2 and MSN .

The regulator sent the relevant notifications to the administrations of the above resources on February 10, 2017. Owners of all aggregators with attendance of more than 1 million users per day will have to identify themselves, that is, provide the department with relevant information.

The above measures are taken in connection with the entry into force on January 1, 2017 of the Federal Law "On Amendments to the Federal Law" On Information, Information Technologies and Information Protection ", which was signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin on June 23, 2016.
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After the provision and processing of data, eligible resources will be included in the register of news aggregators.

Recall, according to FZ-208, the owners of the aggregators will be required to verify the accuracy of the information they disseminate. Exceptions will be made only for publications and websites of authorities registered in Roskomnadzor.

If aggregators appear in the tape of unverified information, Roskomnadzor has the right not to apply sanctions against them, if the distributor of information can provide information about the original source, which can be identified as media. This was separately reported on the RKN website in December 2016. The attached document explaining the position of the agency states:

According to the provisions of the Federal Law dated June 23, 2016 No. 208- (the so-called law “On news aggregators”), the owner of a news aggregator is not responsible for his dissemination of news information if it is a verbatim reproduction of messages and materials or fragments disseminated by the mass media, which can be established and held accountable for violation of the legislation of the Russian Federation on mass media.
Thus, the legislator has established the possibility of using the news aggregator without additional verification of the accuracy of the information placed in the media, subject to the availability of reliable data on the sources of its distribution.

From the text above it becomes clear that the main purpose of the FZ-208 is to force the purge of aggregator tapes from news from resources that are not official media, or from news resources whose owners cannot be uniquely identified. For inaccurate information received by the aggregator from the registered media, there will be no responsibility.