The Yandex news aggregator began flagging materials published by foreign media outlets.
Now, next to the news of the publications included in the register of foreign agents, a message is published that “this message was created/disseminated by a foreign media performing the functions of a foreign agent”.
At the same time, Yandex refers to the obligations of the news aggregator provided for in Article 10.4 of the Law “On Information, Information Technologies and Information Protection”.
However, according to lawyers, this position does not comply with the law.
According to lawyer Stanislav Seleznev, this article does not contain a direct indication of such a duty of news aggregators, but only references to other regulations, which, in turn, also do not contain an indication of the obligation to mark information with a known set of words like “THIS MESSAGE …” for any or persons other than those directly entered in the registers acting as foreign agents, or who are registered mass media.
As a reminder, the law on foreign media agents was signed by President Putin in December 2019. According to it, Russian media that receive foreign funding must label their materials, and foreign media are also obliged to create legal entities in Russia. There is a fine for the lack of marking.
We also note that at the end of September Yandex.News introduced a new partner account with a special section for statistics on impressions and earnings in the digest.
