On Monday night, Meta—Facebook’s parent company—announced it is banning RT and other Russian media outlets. Meta’s announcement followed a solid week of news out of the White House about RT’s role in Russian influence campaigns, new sanctions, and several arrests related to the Kremlin-backed news agency.
Meta owns Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram. According to the Justice Department, RT and the Kremlin have used the companies as vectors in a global disinformation campaign. “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.
The White House has taken aim at Russian election interference ahead of the November Presidential election over the last two weeks. It began small, but embarrassingly, when the Justice Department announced that two RT employees had spent $10 million commissioning videos from assorted right-wing influencers like Tim Pool. More indictments, sanctions, and accusations followed.
One of the more serious accusations was that RT was lending material support and weapons to Russia’s war effort in Ukraine. According to the Justice Department, RT ran a crowdfunding campaign on social media and used the proceeds to buy weapons which it sent to soldiers on the frontlines. “Military equipment and supplies, to include sniper rifles, suppressors, personal weapon sights, body armor, clothing, night-vision equipment, drones, radio equipment, and diesel generators are imported in small orders to avoid unwanted scrutiny,” Justice said in a press release.
Putin initially denied Russia was meddling in America’s election, but the talking heads at RT quickly gave away the game. “We obey only the orders from the Kremlin,” Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of RT, said on a TV chat show on September 8. “Listen, comrades, what do you think—that I get orders from the CIA? Where else would I get my orders from if I head a Russian state media outlet funded by the state?”
During a conference call with reporters on Tuesday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Meta was discrediting itself. “Such selective actions against Russian media are unacceptable. We have an extremely negative attitude towards this.” he said. “This complicates prospects for normalizing our relations with Meta.”
The Kremlin banned Meta from operating Facebook and Instagram in the country following its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. A Moscow court then later said Meta was guilty of “extremist activity” but allowed WhatsApp to continue operating in the country.
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