Meta bans Russian state media outlets, citing ‘foreign interference activity’

Meta has banned Russian state media from its social media platforms in the wake of the outlets’ “foreign interference activity,” the company announced late Monday.

“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 statement shared with The Hill.

The social media company expects the enforcement to be rolled out over the next few days as part of its broader efforts to combat Russian overt influence operations, Meta said.

The Kremlin railed against Meta’s decision on Tuesday. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters “such selective actions against Russian media are unacceptable,” and alleged Meta is “discrediting themselves” with the decision, The Associated Press reported.

“We have an extremely negative attitude towards this. And this, of course, complicates the prospects for normalizing our relations with Meta,” Peskov said during his daily conference call, the AP reported.

RT was formerly known as Russia Today. Rossiya Segodnya is the parent company for state news agency RIA Novosti and other outlets like Sputnik Radio.

“It’s cute how there’s a competition in the West — who can try to spank RT the hardest, in order to make themselves look better,” RT told The Hill in a statement, adding that Meta’s actions are “censoring information flow to the rest of the world.”

“Don’t worry, where they close a door, and then a window, our ‘partisans’ (or in your parlance, guerrilla fighters) will find the cracks to crawl through — as by your own admission we are apt at doing,” the outlet added.

RT noted Meta and Facebook “already blocked RT in Europe two years ago.” In February 2022, Meta first took steps to limit the spread of Russian state-controlled media, which included blocking such outlets from running ads and adding nudges asking users to confirm they want to share or navigate to content from these outlets. These actions were taken for Meta platforms across the globe in all languages.

Rossiya Segodnya did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Meta’s announcement comes just days after the State Department alleged RT is a convert influence arm of the Russian government. In doing so, it sanctioned the outlet’s parent company, stating RT has “moved beyond being simply a media outlet and has been an entity with cyber capabilities.”

Earlier this month, the Justice Department (DOJ) handed down an indictment accusing two RT employees of leading a covert influence campaign by partnering with conservative company Tenet Media to hire various right-wing influencers. The DOJ also seized more than two dozen web domains it said Russia was using for covert campaigns.

The moves marked some of the strongest taken by the Biden administration to combat alleged efforts by the Russian government the intelligence company has called “the predominant threat to U.S. elections.”