The foreign agent did not come out in size – Newspaper Kommersant No. 233 (7434) dated 12/15/2022

A well-known blogger in Yaroslavl, Andrei Alekseev, who was included in the register of foreign agents, was fined due to an atypical claim by the prosecutor’s office. The agency did not like the size of the capital letters that the blogger used for the mandatory “foreign agency” notice on the VKontakte social network. Roskomnadzor requires that the marking font be twice the size of the message font, and the examination of the prosecutor’s office concluded that in the case of VKontakte, the Caps Lock key does not give the desired size. Lawyers point out that the problem is in poor-quality legislation on foreign agents, which allows for the possibility of different interpretations of the legal norm.

The prosecutor’s office of the Frunzensky district of Yaroslavl complained about Andrey Alekseev’s publications on October 12th. The department stated that on April 1, Mr. Alekseev did not accompany the video posted on the VKontakte social network with the notice “THIS MESSAGE (MATERIAL) IS CREATED AND (OR) DISTRIBUTED BY A FOREIGN MEDIA…”. In addition, the prosecutor’s office did not like the font of the foreign agency’s audio recording, posted on May 12. According to the instructions of Roskomnadzor, the font size of the marking “should be twice the size of the message text.” To comply with this requirement, Mr. Alekseev wrote a notice using the Caps Lock key, which makes all letters capitalized. But an examination conducted by the forensic center of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Yaroslavl Region showed that this is not enough: apparently, in VKontakte, uppercase letters are not strictly twice as large as lowercase ones. “Expert Kuzmin measured the ratio of these very fonts with a ruler and came to the conclusion that our ratio is some kind of goblin 1:1,” the blogger said in his Telegram channel “Chepyzhi”.

On October 26, the Frunzensky District Court of Yaroslavl considered the claims of the prosecutor’s office. Mr. Alekseev explained to the court that in the first case, he immediately added a label about foreign agents to the description of the video after “the prosecutor’s office pointed out this omission.” But in the second episode, the blogger did not see the violation. “The chosen font in capital letters or lowercase letters is visually twice as large as capital letters,” Mr. Alekseev said at the trial. “The technical tools of the VKontakte social network do not allow changing the font size when publishing.”

However, the court sided with the prosecutor’s office and found the blogger guilty of violating the requirements for mandatory labeling of publications created by a foreign agent (part 1 of article 19.34.1 of the Code of Administrative Offenses of the Russian Federation). He was fined 10 thousand rubles. “That is, 24 words in caps, even if they are available, do not guarantee that you are following the order of Roskomnadzor. And all foreign agents essentially violate this order, using only capital letters,” Mr. Alekseev commented indignantly on the court’s decision on social networks. “So, they can bring more and more to the violation, and in general anyone, even the most law-abiding one.”

He tried to appeal this decision. But yesterday, the Yaroslavl Regional Court decided that “Alekseev’s position regarding the absence of violations in the implementation of publications is a way of protection in order to avoid punishment and is not based on the provisions of regulations.” Judge Vladimir Presnov refused to allow the blogger to conduct an additional technical examination of the possibilities of using fonts on VKontakte. The decision of the court entered into force. Andrey Alekseev told Kommersant that now he will not publish posts on VKontakte – this can be done in accordance with the court decision only through formatting the title in the “article” mode.

This is the first known case of attracting a foreign agent for insufficient marking font size, Pavel Chikov, head of the Agora international human rights group, told Kommersant. In his opinion, “it would be right if the parties or the court requested the relevant clarifications of the social network.” Elena Pershakova, head of the legal practice for freedoms of the Human Rights Foundation “Public Verdict” (included in the register of foreign agents), believes that “the occurrence of a precedent speaks of the problem of the quality of laws governing the activities of foreign agents”: “The need to resort to expertise to bring to administrative responsibility in this case indicates the existence of an appraisal norm. What in practice has led and leads to arbitrary application of the law. If the legislation meets the requirements of quality, it does not contain ambiguous, inaccurate categories and allows a person to correlate his actions and behavior with it. From this case it is clear that the person tried to fulfill the law, but the lack of precision in the wording did not allow him to do so. In such a situation, the presumption of innocence provided for in the Code of Administrative Offenses of the Russian Federation should have worked – all doubts about the guilt of the person involved should be interpreted in his favor. But, apparently, the courts in this case forgot about the presumption or ignored it.”

Alexander Tikhonov, Yaroslavl; Alexander Chernykh