Yandex news aggregator starts warning Russian readers which sources are ‘foreign agents’

Yandex’s news aggregator has started labeling content from media outlets designated as “foreign agents” in Russia. The website now displays the words “FOREIGN AGENT” next to these publications’ names, followed by a dropdown menu that contains a full legal disclosure. 

There’s some dispute about whether the law actually requires Yandex to share these designations. 

Spokespeople for the company told Interfax that Russia’s laws on news aggregators require Yandex to comply with media distribution rules, but Stanislav Seleznev, a legal expert for the Net Freedoms Project, argues that the “foreign agent” law’s disclosure requirements apply only to mass media outlets themselves. Seleznev points out that the regulations Yandex cited do not mention “foreign agents” at all: Article 10.4 (part 1, clause 7) of the Law on Information refers to Article 25 of the Law on the Mass Media, which in turn cites Article 5 of the Law on Protecting Children From Harmful Information. “Foreign agents” and the related disclosure rules appear nowhere in these laws.

At the time of this writing, the Russian Justice Ministry has designated 86 media organizations and individual journalists as “foreign agents.” In September 2021, more than 200 media outlets, nonprofit groups, charities, and education institutions launched a petition demanding the repeal of Russia’s “foreign agent” law. Nearly 180,000 people have signed the document.