SAN FRANCISCO – Social media giants Twitter and Facebook parent Meta moved yesterday to curb the presence on their platforms of Russian state-linked news outlets, which stand accused of pushing misinformation about Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
The tech platforms have become one of the fronts in the internationally condemned attack, home to sometimes false narratives but also real-time monitoring of a conflict that marks Europe’s biggest geopolitical crisis in decades.
Meta said it would be restricting access in the European Union to RT and Sputnik, which Western nations have accused of being Kremlin mouthpieces and serving as a platform to argue for war.
The social media behemoth’s vice-president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, cited the “exceptional nature of the current situation” in announcing the decision but offered no details.
Just hours earlier, Twitter said it would put warnings on tweets sharing links to Russian state-affiliated media.
Twitter’s head of site integrity, Yoel Roth, wrote that the platform has been seeing more than 45,000 tweets per day sharing links to the outlets.
“Our product should make it easy to understand who’s behind the content you see, and what their motivations and intentions are,” he added.
In addition to adding labels that identify the sources of links, Roth said the platform is also “taking steps to significantly reduce the circulation of this content on Twitter”.
Twitter and Facebook have both been hit with access restrictions in Russia since the invasion of Ukraine and are now “largely unusable”, said web monitoring group NetBlocks. – AFP, March 1, 2022
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