Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, announced on Monday that it will ban RT and other Russian state media from its platforms globally. This decision comes after the State Department imposed sanctions on Kremlin-backed news organizations.
“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 stated in a statement provided to TIME.
Prior to the ban, RT had over 7 million followers on Facebook, while its Instagram account had over a million followers.
This action represents an escalation of measures Meta implemented in 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. These measures included labeling and downranking posts containing links to Russian state-controlled media outlets, demonetizing their accounts, and prohibiting them from running ads. The company also complied with requests from the E.U. and U.K. governments to restrict access to RT and Sputnik in those territories. In March 2022, Russia retaliated by blocking access to Facebook and Instagram within its borders.
Meta’s latest actions follow a statement by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who asserted that the U.S. government has concluded that Rossiya Segodnya and five of its subsidiaries, including RT, “are no longer merely firehoses of Russian Government propaganda and disinformation; they are engaged in covert influence activities aimed at undermining American elections and democracies, functioning like a de facto arm of Russia’s intelligence apparatus.” Sanctions were imposed on RT’s parent company TV-Novosti, as well as on Rossiya Segodnya and its general director Dmitry Kiselyov. The State Department also issued a notice describing them as “.” Dmitry Peskov, spokesperson for Russian President Vladimir Putin, dismissed the State Department’s allegations as “nonsense.”
Meta’s new global ban echoes a similar YouTube on Russian state-funded media channels, while TikTok and X (formerly Twitter) block access to RT and Sputnik in the E.U. and U.K.