A court in Moscow has fined the messaging service Telegram four million rubles (approximately 45,000 euros) on Monday for refusing to remove prohibited content in Russia. The Telegram channel of the Moscow courts of general jurisdiction shared the following statement:
“The Moscow Tagansky District Court found Telegram Messenger Inc. guilty of committing an administrative offense under Article 13.41 of the Administrative Code of the Russian Federation and imposed a fine in the form of a monetary penalty of four million rubles.”
Telegram Messenger Inc. has already been fined multiple times under this article. The same court fined the company three and a half million rubles in February.
The total amount of fines imposed by Russian courts against Telegram over a period of three years, up to and including February, amounted to 63.4 million rubles. The highest individual fines – each seven million rubles – were imposed for not deleting a call to extremist crimes and in one case for the dissemination of child pornography.
The nature of the prohibited content in the latest case is not clear from the statement by the Moscow judiciary.