Meta bans Russia’s state media outlets
Platform cites foreign interference
Meta said it’s banning Russia state media organization from its social media platforms, alleging the outlets used deceptive tactics to amplify Moscow’s propaganda.
The announcement drew a rebuke from the Kremlin on Tuesday.
The company, which owns Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, said late Monday it will roll out the ban over the next few days in an escalation of its efforts to counter Russia’s covert influence operations.
“After careful consideration, we expanded our ongoing enforcement against Russian state media outlets: Rossiya Segodnya, RT and other related entities are now banned from our apps globally for foreign interference activity,” Meta said in a prepared statement.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov lashed out, saying “such selective actions against Russian media are unacceptable,” and that “Meta with these actions are discrediting themselves.”
“We have an extremely negative attitude toward this. And this, of course, complicates the prospects for normalizing our relations with Meta,” Peskov told reporters during his daily conference call.
RT was formerly known as Russia Today. Rossiya Segodnya is the parent company behind state news agency RIA Novosti and news brands like Sputnik. Neither company responded immediately to a request for comment.
“It’s cute how there’s a competition in the West — who can try to spank RT the hardest, in order to make themselves look better,” RT said in a statement.
Meta’s actions comes days after the U.S. announced new sanctions on RT, accusing the Kremlin news outlet of being a key part of Russia’s war machine and its efforts to undermine its democratic adversaries. U.S. officials alleged last week RT was working hand-in-hand with the Russian military and running fundraising campaigns to pay for sniper rifles, body armour and other equipment for soldiers fighting in Ukraine. They also said RT websites masqueraded as legitimate news sites but were used to spread disinformation and propaganda in Europe, Africa, South America and elsewhere.
Earlier this month, the Biden administration seized Kremlin-run websites and charged two RT employees of covertly providing millions of dollars in funding to a Tennessee-based content creation company to publish English-language social media videos pushing pro-Kremlin messages. Moscow rejected the allegations. Meta had already taken steps to limit Moscow’s online reach. Since 2020, it has been labelling posts and content from state media. Two years later, it blocked state media from running ads and putting their content lower in people’s feeds, and the company, along with other social media sites like YouTube and TikTok, blocked RT’s channels for European users.
Moscow has fought back, designating Meta as an extremist group in March 2022, shortly after sending troops into Ukraine, and blocking Facebook and Instagram. Both platforms — as well as Elon Musk’s X, which is also blocked — were popular with Russians before the invasion and the subsequent crackdown on independent media and other forms of critical speech.