Listen to this articleRussia, which was accused of interfering in America’s 2016 presidential election, is now accusing Facebook and Google of interfering in its regional elections.
Russian state communications watchdog Roskomnadzor mentioned that Facebook and Google allowed political adverts throughout Sunday’s regional elections regardless of being requested to ban such publicity.
“During the monitoring of mass media on voting day, on Google’s search engine, on Facebook and on YouTube, political advertising was established,” the company mentioned on its web site.
“Such actions can be seen as interference in Russia’s sovereign affairs and hindering the conduct of democratic elections in the Russian Federation.”
Roskomnadzor additionally warned the U.S tech giants, Facebook and Twitter of violating Russian legal guidelines by not storing information in the nation. They threatened to ban Google for not connecting its search engine to the federal database of banned web sites.
Roskomnadzor mentioned there could be an “adequate reaction” if the businesses printed the political adverts. The scenario will now be “thoroughly examined” by the related fee in the Russian Parliament.
According to Russian media, Aleksandr Malkevich, a high-ranking member of Russia’s Civic Chamber, mentioned that Google “displayed ads for the so-called ‘Smart Voting’ system promoted by opposition figure and video blogger Aleksey Navalny—these ads are said to have been shown to users searching for data on the local elections in Moscow.”
Google and Facebook haven’t but responded to requests for feedback on the time of this report.
