As of August 1st, 2014 all blogs which have 3,000 daily readers or more will be forced to follow the same set of rules and standards as conventional mass media. The law was signed by Vladimir Putin back in May and and applies to all blogs written in Russian and targeting Russian audiences. So even if you live in New York, and your blog is hosted within the United States – you’re still liable to uphold the new regulations.
The amendments to the Administrative Code, the Law of Information and the Law on Communications, also known as the “Bill on Bloggers,” don’t just inconvenience people by forcing them to register with the authorities, but also by the fact that they’ll have to start acting like proper media organizations.
This means authors will have to verify information before publishing it and to abstain from posting things that can be seen as slander, hate speech, extremist calls, or other banned information. To sum it up, this is the actual part that the government wants to focus on, namely controlling not only what the media can say, but also what bloggers talk about.
Individuals who violate the law can be fined with between 10,000 and 30,000 rubles (US$285-$855 / €212-€637), while for larger popular blogs maintained by legal entities things can be a lot nastier, with fines of up to 500,000 rubles ($14,285 / €10,643).
With that said a few internet corporations have, rightfully, sided with the bloggers here and have done what they can to lend a helping hand. Yandex, the country’s equivalent to Google, has stopped publishing statistics on blog views, while LiveJournal, one of the most popular blogging platforms in the world, has altered the way readers’ statistics look, so it displays a top figure of “2500+.”