The judgment contributes to a contraction of expression in Russia, and comes amid the ongoing crackdown on social media platforms, as the government attempts to control and censor them. All the Twitter posts (that remain available on the platform) listed in the three court rulings called for participation in protest political actions in support of jailed Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny, most referring to the first mass rally in the protest wave of early 2021 in the immediate aftermath of Navalny’s detention and Navalny’s organization – “Anti-Corruption Foundation’s” release of an investigation film movie into Vladimir Putin’s corruption. That investigation film got more than 123 million views on YouTube, while tens of thousands of Russians went to protest all across the country on January 23, 2021. The Twitter posts listed in the judgments confirm the wide geographical scale of the protest rallies: the posts’ authors called for participation in cities far beyond Moscow and St. Petersburg, including Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, Omsk, Chelyabinsk, Nizhny Tagil, Nizhny Novgorod, Kostroma, Ivanovo, Vladimir, and Bryansk. The posts included such hashtags as #FreedomToNavalny, #IAmGoingOut, #ForNavalny, and #ForFreedom.
These events led to many court cases against social media platforms, under Part 2 of Art. 13.41 of the Code of Administrative Offenses of the Russian Federation. Facebook (later as Meta), Google, TikTok, Telegram, and Twitter received fines ranging from 1.5 million to 26 million rubles. Shortly after the three verdicts against Twitter in the present three cases, on April 6, 2021, Magistrates Court №422 in the Tagansky District of Moscow ruled that TikTok had failed to restrict access to prohibited content (posts with calls for participation in unauthorized protest rallies) and this decision was upheld by the appellate court. TASS reported that TikTok received a fine of 2.6 million rubles (around USD$33.9 thousand at the time). That court later found TikTok guilty under the same provisions on May 27, 2021, imposing a fine of 1.5 million rubles (around USD$20.5 thousand at the time), as reported by TASS. On December 16, 2021, the same charges on two administrative offenses were brought against TikTok, with two fines totalling 4 million rubles (around USD$54.2 thousand at the time), according to Interfax.
Roskomnadzor pursued the strategy of compiling administrative protocols against social media platforms for their repeated failure to comply with the office’s content restriction requests. On December 24, 2021, that strategy reached a culmination for Meta and Google, as both companies were found guilty under Part 5 of Art. 13.41 of the Code of Administrative Offenses of the Russian Federation (“repeated perpetration of an administrative offense provided for by parts 1 or 2 of the article”) by Magistrates’ Court №422 in the Tagansky District of Moscow. The court imposed fines of unprecedented amounts: 7.2 billion rubles (around USD$98.4 million at the time) and 1.9 billion rubles (around USD$27 million at the time), as reported by Interfax, for Google and Meta respectively. The Court calculated the fine amounts based on 5 percent of the companies annual revenues in Russia.
This case did not set a binding or persuasive precedent either within or outside its jurisdiction. The significance of this case is undetermined at this point in time.