As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continues, more Big Tech companies are taking measures to restrict Russian state-affiliated sites and content.
The Daily Wire reports:
According to Politico, “The company began labeling and de-amplifying official Russian media accounts in 2020, Twitter said. The additional action announced on Monday applies to individual Twitter accounts that share links from those state-affiliated sites.”
“Since the invasion, we’ve seen more than 45,000 Tweets a day from individuals on Twitter sharing these links — meaning that now the overwhelming majority of content from state-affiliated media is coming from individuals sharing this content, rather than accounts we’ve been labeling for years as state-affiliated media,” Twitter spokesperson Elizabeth Busby told the outlet in an email.
Twitter already has a list of media groups of the Russian Federation, as well as twenty additional countries. The “new label will automatically apply to any tweeted URLs from a designated state-affiliated media website,” per Politico.
“The social media company also announced it will continue to de-amplify articles from these websites by barring the URLs from the platform’s top search function,” it added. Twitter also will not “recommend” tweets that have articles from the websites.
Twitter isn’t the first Big Tech company to take harsher measures against Russia. Video sharing platform YouTube also announced it is banning some Russian state media outlets in Europe.
The Hill reports:
YouTube said on Tuesday that RT and Sputnik would be banned immediately from its platform.
“It’ll take time for our systems to fully ramp up. Our teams continue to monitor the situation around the clock to take swift action,” a YouTube spokesperson stated.
Reuters, which first reported YouTube’s decision, noted that Russian-backed media has been distributing misinformation to viewers about the invasion, which Russian President Vladimir Putin has falsely claimed was meant to liberate the Ukrainian people.
YouTube previously said the Russian-backed outlets would not be allowed to earn money from ads on its platform.
Other major media companies such as Meta, previously known as Facebook, are also moving to restrict some Russian-state affiliated content.
