Facebook Owner Meta Bans Russia State Media Outlets Over ‘Foreign Interference’

LONDON (AP) — Meta said it’s banning Russia state media organization from its social media platforms, alleging that 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 that 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 spokesman Dmitry Peskov lashed out, saying that “such selective actions against Russian media are unacceptable,” and that “Meta with these actions are discrediting themselves.”

“We have an extremely negative attitude towards 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.

In a news article, RT said its chief editor, Margarita Simonyan, joked about the ban.

“Seriously? Did you run out of mirrors?” she said.

Meta’s actions comes days after the United States 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 that RT was working hand-in-hand with the Russian military and running fundraising campaigns to pay for sniper rifles, body armor 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 has rejected the allegations.

Meta had already taken steps to limit Moscow’s online reach. Since 2020 it has been labeling posts and content from state media and in 2022 it started blocking state media from running ads and putting their content lower in people’s feeds. That year the company also took down a sprawling Russia-based disinformation network spreading Kremlin talking points about the invasion of Ukraine.

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, formerly known as Twitter, which is also blocked — were popular with Russians before the invasion and the subsequent crackdown on independent media and other forms of critical speech. The social media platforms are now only accessible through virtual private networks.

In April, a Russian court convicted Meta communications director Andy Stone of justifying terrorism and sentenced him to six years in prison in a swift trial in absentia. The charges against Stone stemmed from his remarks in 2022 following Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24 that year.

Stone, who is based in the United States, announced temporary changes to Meta’s hate speech policy to allow for “forms of political expression that would normally violate (its) rules, like violent speech such as ‘death to the Russian invaders.’”

In the same statement, Stone added that “credible calls for violence against Russian civilians” would remain banned. The Russian authorities nonetheless opened a criminal case implicating Stone and other unidentified Meta employees, describing the statement as “illegal calls to violence and killings of Russian citizens.”

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Dasha Litvinova in Tallinn, Estonia contributed to this report.