The Prosecutor General’s Office of the Russian Federation fined Telegram 4 million rubles ($40,000) for refusing to remove the telegram channels Nexta, 1ADAT and UNIAN, as well as posts about Putin’s niecewrites the independent Russian-language media “Verstka”. The department requested the removal of six Telegram channels, as well as 11 Telegram posts about the president’s niece, Anna Tsivileva, which, according to the department, contained “unreliable socially significant information.”
In particular, from October 2022 to March 2024, the prosecutor’s office requested the removal of the Chechen opposition channel 1ADAT, the channel of the Ukrainian journalist Yuriy Butusov, the Israeli military analyst Yigal Levin, the Belarusian opposition channel Nexta, as well as the channels of the Ukrainian news agency UNIAN and the Pravda Gerashchenko channel. It is unclear what content prompted the prosecutor’s requests.
In addition to the removal of the channels, the prosecutor’s office also requested the removal of 11 posts published by some Telegram channels connected to Radio Liberty, from the article aggregator “Otchatka”, as well as from the channels “Wife of the Military”, “Mobilization”, Svodka Material, “LIStok”, “Polyanytsia” and “Green Lighthouse”. In all these cases the posts talked about the foundation ‘Defenders of the Fatherland’, led by Putin’s niece, Anna Tsivileva. In particular, the posts reported that the foundation would be allocated tens of billions of rubles from the state budget.
According to the prosecutor’s office, Telegram did not comply with the required requirements. As a result, on August 13, the Tagansky Court in Moscow fined the social network 4 million rubles for “failure to delete information prohibited in the Russian Federation.”
