MOSCOW. April 13 (Interfax) - A Moscow justice of the peace has imposed a 2-million-ruble administrative fine on Wikimedia Foundation Inc. over the failure to remove fake information about actions of the Russian Armed Forces during the special military operation in Ukraine from Wikipedia.
"To impose a 2-million-ruble administrative fine on Wikimedia Foundation Inc.," Justice of the Peace of Judicial District No. 422 in Moscow's Tagansky district Timur Vakhrameyev said.
The Wikimedia Foundation was found guilty of failure to remove prohibited information.
According to materials in the administrative proceeding read out in court, Wikimedia was charged with failure to remove, at the demand of the prosecution service, a Wikipedia page, which, according to the prosecutors, contained false information about actions of the Russian Armed Forces in the Zaporozhye region during the special military operation.
This is the third time Wikimedia has been fined in 2023 over failure to remove prohibited information. It was fined 2 million rubles in February over failure to remove fake information about the special military operation and an 800,000-ruble fine was imposed in April over failure to remove extremist content.
The Wikimedia lawyer asked the court to drop the case and said that, by law, a motion of the kind should be processed at the location of the legal entity rather than the watchdog, Roskomnadzor, and that the prosecution service did not say what exact information must be removed. The lawyer also said that the disputed Wikipedia page contained public information, including that from resources of international organizations whose member Russia is, for instance, the United Nations.
The biggest Internet services - Google, Telegram, Facebook (an information resource of an entity banned in Russia), Twitter and TikTok - have been repeatedly fined in Russia in recent years over failure to remove prohibited content.