Roskomnadzor may block Facebook in 2018

The new 2018 year can be very sad for the Russian Facebook audience. If Facebook continues to ignore the Russian law on personal data in the wording in effect since September 1, 2015, Roskomnadzor may eventually gain courage and block the world's largest social network.



“The law is mandatory for all. In any case, we will either ensure that the law is enforced, or the company will stop working in the territory of the Russian Federation, as unfortunately happened to LinkedIn. There are no exceptions, - such a statement was made today by the head of Roskomnadzor, Alexander Zharov, in a comment to Interfax. He called and specific dates. “In 2018, everything will be fine.”



“We are well aware that Facebook has a significant number of users on the territory of the Russian Federation, on the other hand, we understand that this is not a unique service, there are other social networks,” said Zharov.



Facebook is not in contact with Roskomnadzor lately. The representative of Roskomnadzor, Vadim Ampelonsky, explained that Roskomnadzor had no specific plans to close access to Facebook, but the company had not been in touch for a long time, the last time was at the end of 2016. “And if Twitter’s position is clear to us, then we don’t have an understanding of Facebook’s position. I hope we will discuss this with them in the coming months, ”said Ampelonsky.



How important is the Russian audience for Facebook to make contact with Roskomnadzor? Judge for yourself: Facebook’s global monthly audience is 2.01 billion people , including the Russian one - 12.4 million people . This is more than AliExpress, Instagram and Odnoklassniki, but less than Wikipedia and Mail.ru.



Facebook is the 7th most popular website in Russia, but the share of Russian users in the general Facebook audience is only 0.62%! That is, if Russia falls off, Facebook may not notice anything. The company has 35 international offices, in Moscow there is no such thing.



Since 2014, Facebook has opened the official mirror in Tor. The site is available at facebookcorewwwi.onion .



Blocking threatens not only Facebook, but also many other foreign Internet companies, if they don’t transfer their servers to Russia: from Telegram to Twitter. However, the latter has already written a letter to Roskomnadzor and has designated its time limit for the transfer of servers: mid-2018, so that until that moment Alexander Zharov promised not to check it.