MOSCOW, May 06. /ITAR-TASS/. Media watchdog Roskomnadzor has launched testing of an automatic system to monitor online sources for foul language, which is expected to be introduced by the fourth quarter of 2014, the agency’s spokesperson Vadim Ampelonsky told Izvestia daily.

“The system is aimed to search for bad language in articles and comments,” the Russian Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media spokesperson is reported as saying. Specialists are said to be filtering around 5,000 mass media items manually as the supervisor compiles a list of key words to watch for.

The system is initially tuned to search for texts and images but will probably extend to audio and video files in the future, the newspaper says, quoting start-up costs of around $698,000.

Launch could have been earlier as the tender for a system to search for mass media sites about extremist propaganda, drugs and pornography was announced in April 2011, the article adds.

The tender for a maximum $419,000 contract was won by DataCenter, pricing its service at $128,000. Yet in February 2013, Moscow Commercial Court ruled that the solution DataCenter presented in December 2011 did not comply with the technical specifications and would fail to complete the necessary tasks.

This obliged the company to repay the $42,000 it had received, the paper reported.