The parent company of Facebook or Instagram, Meta announced on Monday that it will ban access to Russian state media outlets globally and across all its apps due to “foreign interference activities.”
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The news agency “Rossiya Segodnya”, RT and other related entities are now banned from our applications globally for foreign interference activities,” Meta said in a statement.
RT had 7.2 million followers on Facebook and one million followers on Instagram before the ban was announced, US media reported.
The ban comes after The United States has accused RT, formerly known as Russia Today, and employees of this state-owned media outlet of channeling $10 million through shell companies to covertly finance influencer campaigns on social media such as TikTok, Instagram, X and YouTube.
US prosecutors said an RT editor-in-chief created an “entire empire of covert projects” aimed at shaping public opinion among “Western audiences.”
One of those projects involved financing and managing a digital content company in Tennessee, according to the indictment.
According to reports regularly published by Facebook, Since 2017, Russia is the country that produces the most influence operations that are then interrupted on its platform, a trend that increased after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
The Biden administration also announced the launch of a diplomatic effort to alert the international community to what US officials have described as RT’s role as a “full member of the intelligence apparatus.”
“Our most powerful antidote to Russia’s lies is the truth,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters on Friday.
Facebook and Instagram have been blocked in Russia since 2022 as part of the Kremlin’s policy against Western social media.
According to an indictment filed in New York, RT had to cease formal operations in the United Kingdom, Canada, the European Union and the United States due to sanctions stemming from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
CNN reported that Executives from Meta, Microsoft and Alphabet, which owns Google, are due to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday on their platforms’ work to combat foreign threats to U.S. elections.
Russia’s reaction to Meta’s ban
The Kremlin on Tuesday described as “unacceptable” the ban on the RT television channel and other Russian state media from the platforms of Meta, owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
“Meta discredits itself. Such targeted actions against Russian media are unacceptable,” said presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov at his daily telephone press conference.
He added that Meta’s actions “complicate the prospects for normalizing relations” with the Russian authorities, which have already blocked access to Facebook and Instagram in this country following the outbreak of the war in Ukraine.
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