UPDATE: Russian deputy wants to equate social networks to telecom firms

(Adds comments from company in last two paragraphs)

MOSCOW, Jan 13 (PRIME) -- Andrei Lugovoi, a deputy from the liberal-democratic party LDPR at Russia’s State Duma, the parliament’s lower house, has suggested equating social networks to connection operators, PRIME reported on Friday.

“It’s high time we raise the issue of defining all social networks as connection operators to apply completely different requirements to them, so that our citizens, our children would not be recruited to go to Syria and other flashpoints,” Lugovoi said.

A spokesperson for local Internet giant Mail.ru Group – owning the country’s three biggest social networks VKontakte, Odnoklassniki and My World – said that such services, as well as the Internet, function via connection operators.

“It’s obvious for a specialist that SMSs, phone calls, messages, parcels and cables, along with the Internet access and communication via social networks, all these things are done only with the help of connection operators,” the spokesperson said.

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