The conflict between Russia and Ukraine is also being settled on social networks and the latest sanctions on the short video social network TikTok and the streaming Twitch are a sample of it.
This Tuesday, October 4, it became known that the Russian government of Vladimir Putin fined TikTok for failing to remove (“when warned,” the penalty says) content that violates Russian laws related to “LGBT propaganda.”
In parallel, also applied a fine to the service of streaming Twitter for hosting an interview with a Ukrainian politician that, for Moscow, included “false information”.
According to the Russian agency Interfax, TikTok tried to avoid the sanction in court, but was unsuccessful.
Neither the social network of videos of Chinese origin nor the service of streaming live they have spoken with the Western media on the subject.
The fines are one more example of the fight that the Kremlin is carrying out with the big tech companies linked to the content and storage of information of Russian citizens.
According to the Russian Justice, TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese ByteDance, supports a fine of 3 million rubles (just over 51 thousand dollars or 1 million Mexican pesos).
Interfax says that the sanction against TikTok is based on allegations related to the social network being “giving rise to non-traditional values, LGBT, feminisms and distorted representations of sexual valuestraditional ales”.
Twitch, which belongs to the technological giant Amazon.com, will have to pay four million rubles (68 thousand dollars or 1.3 million Mexican pesos).
According to the agencies (Vladimir Putin’s government did not provide information in this regard) the fine is due to the fact that Twitch gave rise to an interview with Oleksiy Arestovychadviser to the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
Twitch had already been fined 3 million rubles in early 2022 for another similar interview with Arestovych, weeks before the start of the armed conflict.
The law on which this latest sanction is based is the one that was approved in March and that prohibits “discrediting” the Russian armed forces. Provides sentences of up to 15 years.
Separately, Twitch is also on the verge of two new sanctions of up to 8 million rubles for failing to delete what Russia understands to be unreliable information about the course of “special military operations” in neighboring Ukraine.
“Gay propaganda” in Russia: sanction on TikTok
Regarding the law that Russia says TikTok violated and for which it applied the sanction, the Kremlin is analyzing expanding it. The so-called “LGBT propaganda law” was passed in 2013 and prohibits any person or organization from promoting homosexual relationships to children.
The Russian government says that the norm should be extended to adults and that the amounts of sanctions should be increased in the case of minors “exposed” to “gay propaganda”.
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