On the afternoon of October 3, Roskomnadzor posted a reminder on Telegram about the procedure for registering channels. The agency said that after submitting an application through Gosuslugi, an account owner in the messenger must launch a special bot.
According to the regulator, the registration number assigned on Gosuslugi is then checked against the number entered into the bot. The post stressed that “there is no other procedure for confirming ownership of a channel on this social network.” It also warned that skipping this step would be treated as a formal sign of refusal, meaning the registration process would have to start over.
Roskomnadzor attached to the post a link to instructions published on Telegraph, but provided no links to the relevant decree. After that, many Russian media outlets published stories with headlines suggesting that bloggers had been ordered to transfer the rights to their Telegram channels to the agency itself.
By the evening of the same day, Roskomnadzor issued an additional explanation. In a new post on October 3, it explicitly clarified for the first time that it was referring to a bot that has been operating since April.
According to the agency, the bot is intended for channel owners already registered in Roskomnadzor’s bloggers’ registry so they can obtain a mark for their channel. The regulator also claims that this is the only way to confirm a page owner’s rights, because only through the bot can a channel receive the “A+” label.
At the same time, the report says using the bot is not mandatory: data can also be confirmed through a special form on Gosuslugi. Meduza notes that major official Telegram channels, including those of Dmitry Medvedev and Roskomnadzor itself, do not carry the “A+” mark. Instead, their descriptions contain a link to Gosuslugi.
From this, the outlet concludes that neither Medvedev nor the agency itself used the bot. It also emphasizes that under the law, the duty to place the “A+” mark lies not with bloggers but with the social network itself if a channel’s audience exceeds 10,000 subscribers.