Public transport passengers “can and should” kick out fellow passengers who don’t wear masks, the mayor of Russia’s fourth-largest city of Yekaterinburg said Tuesday.
The Sverdlovsk region, where Yekaterinburg is the administrative center, is Russia’s fifth most-affected federal subject by the coronavirus pandemic. It has confirmed a total of 33,425 Covid-19 cases and 718 deaths since the start of the outbreak.
Yekaterinburg Mayor Alexander Vysokinsky said in an interview with the city’s e1.ru news website that passengers “can and should” kick off fellow riders who aren’t wearing masks to prevent the spread of Covid-19.
“We’ll have to reinstate restrictions if we don’t follow simple rules and infections increase,” Vysokinsky said.
His spokesman later accused the media of taking the mayor’s words out of context, saying Vysokinsky “asked everyone to behave responsibly.”
E1.ru reported Wednesday that passengers’ resistance to wearing masks when boarding buses has severely delayed schedules and in several cases led to mass altercations. Similar standoffs have been reported in Moscow, where authorities stepped up the enforcement of mask and glove mandates in the metro and on buses.
Meanwhile, reports citing unnamed medical sources said rising numbers of Covid-19 cases have brought Yekaterinburg’s hospitals to full capacity.
Russia has seen a record-breaking surge in Covid-19 infections and deaths in recent weeks but has opted toward targeted restrictions instead of reintroducing strict lockdown measures.
Russia’s official number of Covid-19 cases stands at more than 1.4 million, the fourth-highest in the world, with daily figures rising by 14,000 to 16,000 in the past week.
Russian Lawyers Seek State Regulations on Recommendation Engines
Lawyers from the Russian Bar Association have called on lawmakers to impose regulations on websites’ recommendation algorithms, the Kommersant business daily reported Tuesday.
The proposed regulations would apply to social networks, news aggregators, streaming services and online marketplaces, Kommersant cited the lawyers as saying in their proposal to the State Duma and Federation Council.
Algorithms recommending content, goods or services based on one’s interests should be independently audited and users should be able to turn them off, the lawyers from the RBA Moscow branch’s commission on legal support for the digital economy said.
These algorithms can artificially create an abnormal interest in goods and «immerse a person inside an information shell that corresponds with his beliefs,» the commission’s head Alexander Zhuravlev told Kommersant.
Such technologies can influence public opinion, «increasing the risk of social conflict,» he added.
The commission proposed imposing the regulations on websites that have at least 100,000 daily users and process the data of at least 500,000 Russian users, Kommersant reported.
In addition to allowing users to turn the algorithms off voluntarily, the lawyers said recommendation algorithms must be audited in order to prevent the promotion of illegal content on these platforms.
Experts interviewed by Kommersant called the proposed regulations “excessive” and warned that they could negatively affect the entire digital economy.
In late 2020, Russia passed several laws aimed at regulating online information, giving officials the ability to block social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube within the country.
This month, Russia threatened to block Twitter, claiming that the platform failed to take down over 3,000 tweets containing banned content related to child pornography, drug use and calls for minors to commit suicide.
