US Tech Giant Meta which owns Facebook and Instagram has banned several Russian news networks including RT, formerly Russian Today.
The company accuses the networks of engaging in deceptive influence operations and attempting to evade deception.
“After careful consideration, we expanded our ongoing enforcement against Rissian state media outlets. Rossiya Segodnya, RT, and other related entities are now banned from our apps globally for foreign interference activity” a statement from Meta read.
The pages of the affected networks are no longer available to users having already been banished from the platform. Before the ban, RT had over 7 million followers on Facebook and over a million on Instagram.
The ban comes after the Biden administration took legal action against RT over alleged election meddling, which RT denies.
“On behalf of our team: Silence us all you want, but there’s no way to silence the truth,” read the statement posted by RT on their X page.
Washington has been pressuring other countries to join in a global coordinated effort.
Speaking to reporters, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, “Today the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada are launching a joint diplomatic campaign to rally allies and partners around the world to join us in addressing the threats posed by RT and other machinery of Russian disinformation and covert influence……we urge every ally, every partner to treat RT activities as they do other intelligence activities by Russian within their borders.”
Commenting on the sanctions imposed by the US on RT, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said even the most dystopian novels could not foresee how low totalitarianism could stoop.
“George Orwell had a very rich imagination and historical foresight. But even he could not imagine what a totalitarian state would look like. He described some of its outlines but was unable to dive into the depths of totalitarianism that we are now witnessing within the framework of so-called rules-based order. Incumbent leaders in Washington who simply suppressed any dissent have of course surpassed him. This is totalitarianism in its purest form,” Lavrov said.
Crackdown on independent speech in the West has been rife. Major social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter (pre-X), and YouTube have come under fire for allegedly censoring political speech, especially from conservative and anti-establishment voices. Claims of “shadow-banning,” content removals, and account suspensions have sparked debates about bias and free speech.
A broader cultural debate has emerged around “cancel culture,” with public figures, academics, and commentators claiming they have been deplatformed or “cancelled” for expressing controversial opinions. For instance, public intellectuals like J.K. Rowling have faced backlash and deplatforming threats for their views on gender identity.
Telegram CEO Pavel Durov was arrested at the end of August and detained in France and has since been placed under formal investigation over suspected complicity in allowing illicit transactions, drug trafficking, fraud, and the spread of child sex abuse images to flourish on his site.
“The claims in some media that Telegram is some sort of anarchic paradise are absolutely untrue. We take down millions of harmful posts and channels every day,” Durov said in a statement published on Telegram.
The app was banned in Russia in 2018, after a previous refusal by him to hand over user data. The ban was reversed in 2021.
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