Trends in State Regulation of Russian Mass Media: a Legal Aspect

Abstract

The article deals with major trends in state regulation of Russian media landscape in the period 2017-2020, which features a large amount of fake news, extremist publications and other information harmful for the people and the society. The authors analyze the key measures taken by the state in order to protect the population from such information and diminish its negative effect, define the problems and difficulties that journalists and Internet-users face, and propose ways of addressing the problems. The article focuses on legal aspects of the governmental bans and regulatory policy as, in the authors opinion, they are primary to the other measures (economic, technological, etc.). Special attention is paid to the state legislative response to such threats as fake news, suicide, drug abuse, extremist or terrorist propaganda, and foreign agents financial impact on Russian media. The research involved an analysis of media reports on the relevant issues, as well as a study of the recent changes in the legislation concerning media landscape and results of other researches in this field. The authors infer that there are two major trends in the state regulation: one is liberalization of privacy laws for media landscape, and the other is harsher punishments for spreading extremist information, fake news and other state abusive content. However, such control should not be always viewed as negative.