MOSCOW, May 27. /TASS/. Twitter will inform the Russian Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media about the status of 600 remaining links with content considered illegal in Russia in early June, the media watchdog’s head Andrei Lipov told reporters in response to a question by TASS.
"After Twitter deleted the lion’s share, or 91%, of illegal content on its network, we held a video call again. <…> We told our colleagues that we see no problem for them to delete the remaining share of illegal content," Lipov said. "We said that we would come back and see what they managed to finish by early June. I think that in the first ten days of June, we will contact them again and hear them out."
He noted that foreign IT services launched dialogue with Russia after the watchdog slowed down Twitter’s traffic on Russian territory due to law violations.
Lipov explained that currently, there is a lull in deleting previously published illegal content. "They really are dealing with all new illegal content, deleting it on time. There is a share of old content that has been there since 2017, about 600 materials, that they haven’t deleted yet," the official stated.
"Other foreign services also came to us after the measures we took (against Twitter - TASS). We will not name those services, because they asked us not to do that until they get back to us with their decisions," he said.
On March 10, Russia’s media watchdog announced it was launching an "initial slowdown" against Twitter’s loading speed in Russia because the service had ignored repeated federal requests to remove nationally prohibited content. The federal regulator vowed to continue these measures against the social giant even going as far as blocking it. On May 17, the watchdog announced that it had decided not to block the network and to lift access restrictions on computers due to the fact that Twitter had deleted 90% of the illegal content. The traffic slowdown on mobile devices remains in place, however.