Meta banned Russian state-owned media accounts — including RT — from its social media platforms late Monday, an action the Kremlin called “unacceptable.”
The owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp said it made the move because Russian state media networks engage in deceptive influence operations, likely aimed at amplifying Moscow’s propaganda online. The U.S. government has made similar claims, announcing last week that it found deep connections between RT and Russian intelligence operations.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said during a press conference on Tuesday that Russian authorities “have an extremely negative attitude” toward Meta’s decision, and that it “complicates the prospects for normalizing the country’s relations with Meta.”
“Such selective actions against Russian media are unacceptable,” Peskov said. “Meta, with these actions, is discrediting itself.”
In an email, a Meta spokesperson said that the company has expanded its 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,” the statement said. This enforcement will roll out over the next few days.
In Russia, Meta was designated as an “extremist” organization in 2022, after the Kremlin accused it of “Russophobia” during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Its platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, are banned in the country and can only be accessed through virtual private network (VPN), which also face frequent disruptions by state regulators.
Meta’s decision followed last week’s announcement by the U.S. Department of State, which accused Russian news agency RT of running a covert influence operation in the U.S. and around the world with the help of a cyber unit tied to Russian intelligence services. The U.S. also expanded its sanctions against Russian media figures.
According to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the Kremlin allegedly embedded “a unit with cyber operational capabilities” within RT in the spring of 2023, with the full knowledge of the organization’s leadership.
The U.S. indicted two RT employees earlier in September on charges of helping run a $10 million operation to covertly spread pro-Russian narratives to U.S. audiences. The Department of Justice also said it seized internet domains used by Russia’s so-called Doppelgänger operation.
Meta said first took steps to limit the spread of Russian state-controlled media across its platforms two years ago. This included blocking Russian state-controlled media from running ads, placing their content lower in people’s feeds, and adding in-product nudges asking people to confirm they want to share or navigate to content from these outlets.
Following these actions, posting volumes were down 43% and engagement levels had fallen 80% six months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine compared to the same day a year earlier, according to Meta.
The company said in a statement that Russia remains “the largest geographic source of covert influence operations, with 39 networks disrupted since 2017, including some linked to employees of Russian state media.”
“Because we’ve seen Russian state-controlled media try to evade detection and enforcement in the past, we expect that they will continue trying to engage in deceptive influence attempts across the internet,” the Meta spokesperson added.
Recorded Future
Intelligence Cloud.
No previous article
No new articles
Daryna Antoniuk
is a reporter for Recorded Future News based in Ukraine. She writes about cybersecurity startups, cyberattacks in Eastern Europe and the state of the cyberwar between Ukraine and Russia. She previously was a tech reporter for Forbes Ukraine. Her work has also been published at Sifted, The Kyiv Independent and The Kyiv Post.
