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Not even close. This is another regime looking to suppress dissent, just like China has been doing all along. They don't trust their own citizens, not "corporations and other stewards of this medium." You're buying a flimsy excuse for cracking down on free speech.Russia, as a sovereign state has the right to make its own mind, including for what it considers dissidents. It's not the place of some foreigners to judge that. Especially since it's a democracy, and people voted for their government, however some foreigners might or might not like it.
Even if you disagree with their current regime, it's the regime the Russian people voted for, and they can also change it in the future.
And regardless if it is a good or a bad government, there is really no excuse for a sovereign country to give access to its citizens data to an external power, especially one which treats foreign information like intelligence data and doesn't care at all about their privacy.
Better to be abused by your own government, the one you voted for, even if it's bad and abusive, than by some regime outside your borders.
If Americans had their Facebook/Google/etc data in a third country and those countries services treated them as US services do, they would be screaming bloody murder.
>Their problem has never been that some company cooperates with the US. It has always been that multinationals couldn't be easily strong-armed into cooperating with the local authorities.
And why shouldn't they be strong-armed into cooperating with the local authorities? It's their country, their rules, not something for multinationals to piss all over.