A selection of Russian state-controlled media outlets will no longer be allowed to use social media platforms Facebook and Instagram after their parent company enacted a ban against them.
TV network RT (formerly known as Russia Today) and media group Rossiya Segodnya were specifically named by Meta as outlets that would no longer be able to use the sites, in addition to other related entities.
The Meta-owned messaging service WhatsApp and X competitor Threads are also included in the suspension, with the company attributing the sanction to the outlets’ “foreign interference activity”.
Global Ban from Meta Platforms
Meta alleges that the Russian state media networks that are subject to the ban are using deceptive tactics to conduct online influencing operations.
As such, the company will roll out a global ban across its Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp platforms within the coming days.
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“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 statement
Meta’s move follows hot off the heels of the sanctions placed on RT that were announced last Friday by Antony Blinken. The U.S. Secretary of State accused the network of enabling “Russian weaponization of disinformation to subvert and polarize free and open societies extends to every part of the world”.
Rossiya Segodnya and RT
The two banned media outlets – Rossiya Segodnya and RT – are both known to be backed by the Kremlin.
Although Rossiya Segodnya is Russian for ‘Russia Today’, the two organizations are ostensibly independent from one another – despite the fact that the same woman, Margarita Simonyan, is the editor-in-chief for both.
Rossiya Segodnya was founded in 2013 and incorporates RIA Novosti, a state-run news agency dating back to 1941 and Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union. It also runs the international Sputnik news outlet and broadcaster.
Output from the RT TV network has been formerly banned in a multitude of countries and its apps have been removed from app stores outside of Russia. This is largely due to allegations against it for spreading disinformation and Russian propaganda.
Meta and Social Media Bans
This isn’t the first time that bans have been enacted on Facebook. Perhaps most famously, it temporarily banned Donald Trump in 2021 after the “violations and the ongoing risk of violence” relating to posts made by the 45th president of the United States around the time of the January 6th Capitol riots.
Back in 2018, controversial TV and podcast presenter Alex Jones received a similar fate, when (along with Apple, Spotify and YouTube) Facebook banned him and output relating to his Infowars content.
It said at that time that: “we have Community Standards and remove anything that violates them, including hate speech that attacks or dehumanizes others. Earlier today, we removed four Pages belonging to Alex Jones for repeatedly posting content over the past several days that breaks those community standards.”
And in 2021, it didn’t just ban a couple of accounts… Facebook blocked all Australian news links. That decision was taken in response to proposed legislation from the Australian government that sought to enforcement payment to publishers for news links shared on the platform.
