Topical Issues of Involvement for Public Distribution of Factory False Information About Circumstances Threatening the Life and Security of Citizens

Information has become a part of the life of a modern person. This is demonstrated in the context of the crisis associated with the pandemic of the new coronavirus infection, when information resources almost completely set the vector of public behavior. The main problem in this case lies not in the risks of expanding the scale of informatization, but in the vulnerability of public perception due to illegal manipulations with deliberately false information by interested parties. The uniqueness of the circumstances in the context of a global pandemic raises a lot of questions in Russian society, but it is not always possible to find unambiguous and reliable answers to them, which ultimately leads to panic and unnecessary actions of suspicious representatives of the population (buying food and medicines, etc.). Russian administrative legislation establishes certain provisions stipulating responsibility for the dissemination of so-called "fake news", but in the current crisis conditions their application turned out to be ineffective. and the safety of citizens. The author comes to the conclusion that for the Russian reality, the regulation of criminal liability for the aforementioned criminal behavior is extremely necessary due to the risk of its large-scale spread in a pandemic, which will ultimately negatively affect the development of the Russian state and society. Attention is focused on the need to improve the existing criminal law in order to increase the efficiency of its application; the author's proposals are formulated.

knowingly false information, public dissemination of information in a pandemic, criminal liability, Russian criminal legislation