A Russian court has fined Google for refusing to remove content it deems illegal.

A Russian court has fined Google 4 million rubles ($ 54,540) for refusing to remove banned content. Russia's Federal Agency for Communications, Information, Technology, and Public Media warned Google on Monday that its traffic in Russia will be decelerated if it did not remove content banned by Moscow.

The announcement comes as Twitter and Russia reached an agreement more than a month ago to remove the banned content.

Earlier, Russia slowed down Twitter traffic for nearly a month because the banned content was not removed.

Also, Facebook was fined 26 million roubles ($353,890) in total, on eight separate counts, while Alphabet Inc's (GOOGL.O) Google was ordered to pay a total of 6 million roubles for three different offenses, Moscow's Tagansky District Court said

A law came into force in Russia on February 1, requiring social media to take immediate action independently to identify and block prohibited content. 219