Russian authorities announced Friday they had restricted local access to Facebook after the company took action against the pages of four Kremlin-backed media outlets.
The country’s communications agency said Meta, the parent company of Facebook, had violated “fundamental human rights and freedoms, as well as the rights and freedoms of Russian citizens” by limiting access to some content from Zvezda TV channel, the RIA Novosti news agency, and the Lenta.ru and Gazeta.ru news sites.
In response, Nick Clegg, Meta’s vice president of global affairs and a former deputy prime minister of the United Kingdom, said that Moscow on Thursday had ordered Thursday to stop independent fact-checking on the platform, as well as to not label content from the four outlets specifying the content had ties to the Kremlin.
“We refused,” Clegg said in a message posted on Twitter. “As a result, they have announced they will be restricting the use of our service.”
The standoff between Meta and Russia comes as disinformation from Moscow-linked media outlets and unverified social media accounts — across the likes of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter — continues to spread despite the companies taking some action to limit the dissemination of such material.
Over the last 24 hours, for instance, the amount of engagement in terms likes, shares and comments from the top five international media outlets controlled by the Kremlin increased by 20 percent compared with the previous one-day period, according to data from CrowdTangle, the social media analytics firm owned by Meta.
It is unclear how far Russian authorities have gone in restricting access to Facebook within the country. Using a so-called virtual private network to pretend being located in Russia, TheTeCHyWorLD was still able to access the platform, including three out of the four Russian media outlets that had some of their material restricted.