People should be brought to justice not for posting their thoughts on the internet, but for calls for violence, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said on Monday.
“It is necessary to outline clear criteria that allow law enforcers to determine the limits of norms,” Medvedev said at a meeting with regional media in southern Russia. He added that there cannot be any freedom “when calls to go and kill somebody are spilling from the internet and social networks.”
Medvedev said that until the posts on the internet contain calls for violence, they can be viewed as discussions of a problem.
“However I get sick over these discussions,” the president complained.
He said that legal responsibility on the internet is a very complicated issue. “To establish legal responsibility for comments on the internet and social networks would mean to destroy the internet itself.”
In June, Russian Communication Minister Igor Shchegolev said at the St.Petersburg International Economic Forum that internet censorship is “absolutely meaningless” since “the model of the internet is designed in a way that information inside it remains unsinkable and self-recovering.”
