Rosfinmonitoring is working on the issue of legal regulation of streamer activities. This was announced to TASS by the deputy director of the service, Herman Neglyad, on Thursday, March 25.
“This is about regulating stream activities as such,” he said.
Neglyad noted that this issue “began to grow from the problem” of the so-called trash streamers, including the problem of the fact that these persons actually earn from the actions they carry out.
Speaking about the possible suppression of such financing, he said that banks need to understand who the recipients of funds are. Is such a recipient in the legal field, that is, is it registered as an individual entrepreneur, does it pay taxes.
He stressed that it is necessary to delimit the persons who work in the legal field from the rest of the streamers.
“The measures are being worked out. Of course, this issue should be resolved with the participation of the regulator in this area. First of all, these are Roskomnadzor and the Federal Tax Service, ”Neglyad said.
Roskomnadzor and the Ministry of Finance did not respond to Izvestia’s request.
Dmitry Lipin, member of the Commission on the Legal Support of the Digital Economy of the Moscow Branch of the Russian Bar Association, said that, given that many streamers have a fairly large audience, their activities should be subject to legal regulation.
He noted that the current Russian legislation imposes a number of restrictions on information that is distributed on the Internet, but streamers in some cases actually fall out of the field of legislative regulation, since their audience receives information on the air, which is why regulators and social networks cannot limit them. content, if it has signs of prohibited by law.
“The regulation of their activities at the legislative level, first of all, should be designed to oblige streamers to independently assess their content for compliance with the law,” he said.
Liping emphasized that, of course, it is necessary to track the funds that streamers receive for their activities. First, the sources of their income can be different, including money can come bypassing the legislation on the financing of terrorism and extremism, from foreign government structures.
Secondly, today streamers actually fall out of tax legislation. Many Russians – doctors, teachers, other employees of budgetary organizations, who “deduct funds from their low salaries to the budget bear a tax burden, but streamers with high incomes do not.” The lawyer called this approach “contrary to the principle of fairness and equality.”
He recalled that from February 2021, amendments to the legislation came into force, according to which the organizers of the dissemination of information (social networks) are obliged to delete information containing signs of violence. But the streams are live, which means that it becomes more difficult for organizers of information dissemination (ARI) to track the signs of violence.
The expert said that recently “there were a number of striking examples” when trash streams led “to terrible consequences, including the death of citizens.” Taking into account the threat posed by such content, it is necessary to make changes to the legislation, possibly to the criminal one.
Unfortunately, according to him, this is exactly the case when one ban cannot be enough, since many trash streams are broadcast in order to earn money.
“In my opinion, people who, in order to earn money, are ready to beat, humiliate, maim someone else on camera, must certainly bear responsibility for their actions,” the specialist concluded.
Gennady Uvarkin, a lecturer at Moscow Digital School, believes that in order to solve the problem of abuse in the activities of streamers, it is necessary to take comprehensive measures, including legislative measures. At the same time, we must not forget that the existing legislation defines the boundaries of what is permissible for any activity, including streamers. He noted that no one has canceled the criminal code, and ignorance of the law does not exempt from responsibility for its violation.
Uvarkin added that the identification of donation recipients will help in the investigation and prevention of various offenses, including those carried out by trash streamers. But this mechanism has a wider scope of application and it is “rather strange” to implement it only for streaming on the Internet.
He expressed the opinion that the solution to the problem of trash streamers should lie in the cooperation of the state and Internet platforms. It is the platforms that have the most developed tools for identifying and suppressing various offenses. In turn, the activities of the platforms in relation to the growing number of crimes, as well as to the propaganda of violence and cruelty “must be socially responsible.”
The chairman of the ad hoc committee of the Federation Council on information policy and interaction with the media, Alexei Pushkov, after a meeting of the committee on March 19, said that Rosfinmonitoring is considering the possibility of registering Internet users who stream as individual entrepreneurs, since they conduct their activities in order to generate income. The senator pointed out that this would “make it much easier” to isolate streamers who are not registered, in particular those who broadcast violently online.
At the plenary session of the Federation Council on March 3, Pushkov raised the topic of introducing an article for trash streams in the Criminal Code of Russia. She was supported by members of the Federation Council.
In January, he proposed punishing trash streams with fines and imprisonment for up to six years.