Facebook bans Russia state media from running adverts, monetising
Move comes hours after Moscow said it was limiting access to Facebook amid fact-checking dispute and invasion of Ukraine.
Facebook says it has restricted Russian state media’s ability to earn money on the social media platform as Moscow’s invasion of neighbouring Ukraine reached the streets of Kyiv.
“We are now prohibiting Russian state media from running ads or monetising on our platform anywhere in the world,” Nathaniel Gleicher, the social media giant’s security policy head, said on Twitter on Friday.
KEEP READING
list of 3 itemsRussia limiting access to Facebook over fact-checking row
Why has Putin attacked Ukraine?
Russia-Ukraine fighting disrupts airline industry
He added that Facebook would “continue to apply labels to additional Russian state media”.
Facebook’s parent company Meta said earlier on Friday that Russia would hit its services with restrictions after it refused authorities’ order to stop using fact checkers and content warning labels on its platforms
Social media networks have become one of the fronts in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, home to sometimes misleading information but also real-time monitoring of a quickly developing conflict that marks Europe’s biggest geopolitical crisis in decades.
“Yesterday, Russian authorities ordered us to stop the independent fact-checking and labelling of content posted on Facebook by four Russian state-owned media organisations,” Meta’s Nick Clegg said in a statement. “We refused.”
His statement came hours after Russia’s media regulator said it was limiting access to Facebook, accusing the American tech giant of censorship and violating the rights of Russian citizens.
On Wednesday, Facebook also released a feature in Ukraine that allows people to lock their profiles for increased security, using a tool the company also deployed after Afghanistan fell to the Taliban last year.
Gleicher said Facebook had set up a special operations centre to monitor the situation in Ukraine “in response to the unfolding military conflict”.
Ukraine invasion: Russians get limited access to Facebook, others
February 26, 2022 Editor World Stage 
Russia has limited access to Facebook over the platform’s stance on the accounts of several Moscow-backed news outlets amid the invasion of Ukraine.
Russia’s communications regulator Roskomnadzor accused the network of “censorship” and violating “the rights and freedoms of Russian citizens”.
Facebook said it had refused to stop fact-checking and labelling content from state-owned news organisations.
The move came a day after Russia launched its attack on Ukraine.
It is unclear what the regulator restrictions mean, or to what extent Facebook’s parent company Meta’s other platforms – WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Instagram – are affected.
The regulator had demanded Facebook lift the restrictions it placed on Thursday on state news agency RIA, state TV channel Zvezda, and pro-Kremlin news sites Lenta.Ru and Gazeta.Ru.
It said that Meta had “ignored” these requests.
Sir Nick Clegg, vice-president of global affairs at Meta, said Russian authorities “ordered us to stop the independent fact-checking and labelling” the outlets’ content.
“We refused,” he said.
But he made clear he wanted Russians to continue to use Meta’s platforms.
“Ordinary Russians are using our apps to express themselves and organise for action”, Sir Nick said, and the company wants “them to continue to make their voices heard”.
Many state-owned media outlets in Russia have painted a largely positive picture of Russian military advances in Ukraine, calling the invasion a “special military operation” that had been forced on Moscow.
On Thursday Meta said it had set up a “special operations centre” to monitor content about the conflict in Ukraine.
Russia has its own Facebook equivalents, VK and Odnoklassniki, but Facebook is also popular in the country – as is Meta-owned Instagram.
On Friday, US Senator Mark Warner said Facebook, YouTube and other social media services had “a clear responsibility to ensure that your products are not used to facilitate human rights abuses”.
Meta, has been under pressure to label misinformation – and has been working with outside fact-checkers, including Reuters.
Moscow has also increased pressure on domestic media, threatening to block reports that contain what it describes as “false information” regarding its invasion of Ukraine.
Twitter also told the BBC that its safety and integrity teams were “disrupting attempts to amplify false and misleading information and to advance the speed and scale of our enforcement”.
No comments:
Post a Comment