The expulsion of the Russian international state media RT and Sputnik from the EU raises major questions about its desirability and feasibility. Such EU-wide government interference in the media supply and internet freedom is unprecedented, State Secretary Alexandra van Huffelen (Digital Affairs, D66) acknowledged on Thursday in conversation with Politico† “It must remain a very, very exceptional measure, deployed because it is war.”
RT is seen by the EU as a propaganda tool of the Kremlin, financed by a state fund. According to the European Commission, RT journalists are still free to collect news in Western countries, which would not affect press freedom. However, the spread is restricted as much as possible via the Wednesday formalized regulation.
According to Wouter Hins, emeritus professor of Media Law at Leiden University, proportionality can be questioned. “You can litigate against any publication, but if there is no hate speech or terrorist intent, a total broadcasting ban is not possible under the Dutch Media Act. The mere fact that you carry out unilateral propaganda is no ground for a ban. I can imagine that in a war situation the EU will do this, but if you are fighting against a totalitarian state power, this seems to me to be a measure that is not convincing when it comes to propagating Western values.”
Also read: European Commission Bans Russian State Media – But Doesn’t Talk About It
The EU’s distribution ban includes ‘cable, satellite, IP-TV’ [streaming], internet service providers, internet platforms or applications”. Live feeds from RT (which are in English, French, German, Spanish and Russian) would then no longer be visible, except via a so-called VPN connection that circumvents regional internet restrictions.
Execution, according to Hins, depends on ‘law-abiding private links in the chain’ of distribution. The big tech companies, platforms such as Youtube, Facebook and Twitter, have banned RT this week under political pressure, “but that is in any case still an independent decision,” says Hins. No ban has been announced in the US.
RT is not in the Dutch channel offer
It is still unclear whether internet providers that do not comply with the regulation will be addressed or even fined by regulators. The Media Authority did not yet know on Thursday how the ban should be implemented. In the Netherlands, RT has no place in the channels offered by providers. According to a spokesperson for the ACM, “as far as is now clear”, the blocking of RT by internet providers is within the scope of internet regulation.
The German media authority thwarted the entry of the German-language RT DE earlier this year. The regulations there are much stricter in banning state propaganda from home or abroad. That attitude “can be traced back to the experience of the 1933-1945 period,” says Hins. A license that RT DE obtained in Serbia, while the editors were in Berlin, was rejected by the German media authority. The response from Moscow was predictable: Russian media watchdog Roskomnadzor announced a broadcast ban of the publicly funded international broadcaster Deutsche Welle† Employees of the German medium were also expelled from the country.
Does the EU risk similar retaliation against European journalists or media by censoring RT? The European Federation of Journalists, including the Dutch journalists’ union NVJ, called it “a mistake to fight disinformation with censorship” on Wednesday. Secretary-General Ricardo Gutiérrez fears that the intervention could be “counter-productive”. He pointed to the risk of backlash from Moscow, which would come at the expense of the latest independent news media in Russia. The British-funded BBC World in Russia seems a logical target for such a response, even though the UK is not part of the EU.
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