Accounts will be blocked for promoting gambling in Russian social networks

In Russia, from February 1 this year, amendments to the federal law “On Information, Information Technologies and Information Protection” came into force. The new restrictions also affected gambling advertising. According to the new rules, any owner of a social network, as well as information resources equated to them, is obliged to monitor content for prohibited content. Also specified in the text of the document are clarifying signs of social networks – the attendance of users located on the territory of the Russian Federation, exceeding half a million people per day and posted information for the purpose of campaigning for gambling and lotteries in Russian or other official languages ​​of the Russian Federation. Now the owner of the social network is obliged to check his resource for the presence of prohibited content, and in case of detection – to transfer the data to Roskomnadzor and block the violator’s account. The regulator, in turn, can cancel the block if it considers it unjustified. Blocking content promoting gambling, according to experts, will be quite difficult to implement. The size of the administrative fine for “irresponsible” providers is also provided, non-compliance with the rules of the bill can cost him from three to four million rubles, which is unlikely to scare major foreign players in the industry. There is a parallel between the ban on the promotion of tobacco and alcohol products. Meanwhile, there are more and more taboos for gambling advertising in the world, the UK only in March of this year added to the list of restrictions with three projects, one of which was a complete ban on gambling advertising in Bristol.