Bloggers officially appeared in Russia on August 1

An amendment to the Federal Law "On Information, Information Technologies and Protection of Information" came into force.

The law introduces a concept of "blogger" - owner of the website with attendance of more than three thousand people per day. Bloggers will be required to specify their name and initials, e-mail address. They will not be able to use the website or the page "in commission of criminal offenses, for disclosure of information constituting a state secret or other secret protected by law, for distribution of materials containing public incitement to terrorist activity or publicly justifying terrorism and other extremist materials."

Materials that promote pornography, violence and cruelty, and information containing foul language are prohibited from distributing.

Authors of popular blogs will be also obliged "to verify the accuracy of the information before its posting and immediately delete it in case of invalidity; prevent spreading of information about private life of people; comply with prohibitions and restrictions stipulated by the legislation on elections and referendum.” For example, not to campaign on the eve of a polling day.

At the same time the blogger has the right to seek, receive, send and distribute information; give personal judgments and estimates specifying his name or nickname, spread on a reimbursable basis commercials in compliance with the law. Thus, the abuse of right to distribute public information involves criminal, administrative or other liability in accordance with the legislation of the Russian Federation.

As the regional Roskomnadzor (Federal Supervision Agency for Information Technologies and Communications) explains, today in Bashkortostan there are no official bloggers. The register is only being created in the main federal agency.

The head of Roskomnadzor Alexander Zharov on the website of the department explained that the experts will use generally recognized public counters - OpenStat, Yandex.Metrika, Rating.Mail.ru, Liveinternet for attendance counting.

Besides, the blogger can install a recommended counter on his website to count attendance and to register on his own initiative.

Roscomnadzor has already made arrangements with owners of official counters that they will modify their services under the objectives and methodology of the new law.

The third way is that the supervisory authority may apply to the platform for information on daily attendance of a separate blog.