MOSCOW, March 25 A group of deputies of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine on Monday registered a bill on state regulation of the Telegram messenger in the country, the corresponding document appeared on the parliament’s website.
Member of Parliament Nikolai Knyazhitsky announced last Thursday that he had submitted a bill to the Rada for consideration, which proposes to introduce state regulation of Telegram. The head of the Ukrainian center for countering disinformation under the National Security and Defense Council of the country, Andrei Kovalenko, reported on March 15 that the Ukrainian authorities are not considering blocking Telegram, but are discussing the issue of banning the messenger on the work computers of civil servants who have access to state secrets.
“Based on the appeal of the National Council on Television and Radio, limit the distribution on the territory of Ukraine of programs and/or user information, including user video, that violate the requirements of Articles 36, 42, 119 of this law,” the bill says.
The explanatory note to the document states that the media law does not regulate the activities of the Telegram public access platform, which is proposed to be corrected. In particular, the platform will be obliged to delete the content of Telegram channels at the request of the National Council on Television and Radio Broadcasting, that is, without any court decision.
The bill also stipulates the possibility of requesting blocking of both individual users and Telegram channels in Ukraine. The document proposes to equate “providers of public access platforms through which mass information is distributed” to individual media entities and oblige them to follow the norms of the media law. Providers of public access platforms must open their offices in Ukraine, and at the request of the National Council, they are required to show their ownership and financing structure. If the provider of a public access platform refuses to disclose information about itself, then the public authorities will be prohibited from using such a platform.
Earlier, Andrei Yusov, a representative of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, called Telegram a threat to the country’s security. NSDC Secretary Alexey Danilov in November 2023 announced the need to block Telegram as a malicious application.
In turn, as Yaroslav Yurchyshyn, chairman of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on Freedom of Speech, previously stated, bans and blockings are a last resort that the authorities can use only when there is a critical need.
The Center for Combating Disinformation under the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine reported in March that the authorities had created a list of 355 resources that allegedly deal with disinformation on Telegram, including Russian media, including TASS, RT in Russian, Komsomolskaya Pravda «, «Ukraine.ru». The list also included the Telegram channel of the Ukrainian publication «Strana» — «Country Politics» and the channel of the Ukrainian blogger Anatoly Shariy.