Russia threatens to block Instagram and YouTube because of footage about oligarch Deripaska
Roskomnadzor (Russia's Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media) gave Instagram and YouTube until the evening of February 14 to block posts and videos as stipulated by the Ust-Labinsk court on the lawsuit of businessman Oleg Deripaska to Anastasia Vashukevich (Nastya Rybka) and Alexander Kirillov (Alex Leslie). The agency's representative reported this to Vedomosti newspaper.
Roskomnadzor has been trying for months to get the content voluntarily removed. The representative of Facebook (Instagram’s parent company) has failed to immediately comment on the situation. A Google representative (YouTube’s parent company) declined to comment.
Earlier, Deripaska filed a lawsuit against Vashukevich and Kirillov for publicly posting on social media information about the businessman’s personal, records of his conversations and his photos without his consent. He filed the lawsuit after the Anti-Corruption Foundation of Alexei Navalny published an investigation on February 8 about the vacation of the Vice-Premier Minister of the Russian Federation Sergei Prikhodko on the yacht of Oleg Deripaska.
The investigation was based on information from Vashukevich’s Instagram page and from her book. Vashukevich stated that the businessman saw her taking a video of him. After the claim, she deleted most of the photos with Deripaska from her Instagram page.
The suit was brought to the Ust-Labinsk district court of the Krasnodar Krai. As provisional measures upon lawsuit on February 9, the court included 14 posts in Instagram and ctvm videos on YouTube on its list of prohibited information, as shown in the register of Roskomnadzor.
According to the law, Instagram and YouTube have three working days to block access to this information. Not all internet service providers have the technical abilities to block certain web pages, so some of the Runet users may remain without access to Instagram and YouTube, Vedomosti writes.
Roscomnadzor included the video of the investigation on Youtube and Navalny's website in the register of blacklisted sites from February 10. In the past, the agency has demanded that some media publishers remove photos from publications while investigating, referring to the definition of Ust-Labinsk district court.