Roskomnadzor is outraged that Twitter refuses to open user data

Roskomnadzor sent the administration of the microblogging service Twitter a request for clarification of the company’s position on compliance with the requirements of Russian legislation, agency representative Vadim Ampelonsky told TASS. “They sent it on Friday (February 13 – editor’s note),” Ampelonsky said, refusing to comment on the details of the document.

Twitter problems in Russia

February 10 head of Roskomnadzor Alexander Zharov said that Twitter does not fulfill the requirements of Russian legislation, including those aimed at countering extremism.

“Judging by the statistics provided in their official report, the social network in 2014 satisfied almost 3000 requests from the US government to disclose personal information of users. Of the 108 requests for disclosure of data on traffic to the accounts of popular users sent to the administration of the social network by Roskomnadzor, not a single one was satisfied,” Zharov emphasized.

In his assessment, “Twitter consistently does not comply with the requirements of Russian legislation, including those aimed at countering extremism, and Roskomnadzor has a natural question about the acceptability of such a position for a company that operates in the Russian Federation.”

On February 9, Twitter reported that for the first time since the start of monitoring requests from government agencies in 2012, requests for information about users of service accounts began to come from Russia. If before such requests from Russian government agencies had never come, then in July-December 2014, 108 such requests were received. Twitter noted that they did not provide information on any of them. At the same time, the number of requests from Russian government agencies to Twitter to remove content in the reporting period amounted to 91 requests - Twitter responded and took measures to remove content in 13% of cases.

In early December 2014, Twitter Vice President for Global Public Policy Colin Crowell met with the head of Roskomnadzor, Alexander Zharov, “the parties agreed to allocate a special communication channel at the request of the Russian supervisory agency,” the regulator’s press service reported in December.