The Facebook owner has acted after Washington claimed Russian outlets are espionage offshoots
US tech giant Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has banned several Russian news networks, including RT.
In a statement on Monday, the company said the deplatforming of the media outlets from its apps is due to “foreign interference activity” and would be implemented globally over the next several days.
The US government sanctioned RT last week, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken claiming that the outlet is “functioning as a de facto arm of [Russian] intelligence.”
Moscow has called the move an act of information warfare, which exposes the US inability to fairly compete with Russian messaging.
US officials have expressed frustration with RT’s role in opposing Washington-backed narratives on international affairs.
“One of the reasons – not the only reason – why so much of the world has not been as fully supportive of Ukraine as you would think they would be, given that Russia has invaded Ukraine and violated rule number 1 of the international system – is because of the broad scope and reach of RT, where propaganda, disinformation, and lies is spread to millions if not billions around the world,” State Department spokesman Jamie Rubin told journalists on Friday, following Blinken’s remarks.
RT Editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan joked that RT had learned from the Americans, rather than from Russian intelligence officers.
“Seriously? Did you run out of mirrors?” she asked, commenting on the American allegations.
Since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, Meta has been cooperating with a ban on RT imposed by numerous Western nations, particularly EU members.
The same year, the company faced legal issues in Russia after allowing exemptions in its rules forbidding hate speech. Meta management decided that Ukrainians were entitled to call for violence against Russians and to hail extreme nationalists fighting against Russia on its platforms. Moscow labeled Meta an extremist organization and banned Facebook and Instagram in Russia.
