SAN FRANCISCO: Social media services are intensifying their crackdown on Russian media outlets including RT, the state-owned television network that has come under scrutiny in the United States, saying the outlets had carried out covert influence campaigns across social media sites to manipulate discourse online.

Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, said Monday that a ban would take place in the coming days. The move escalates actions against Russian state media actors that US intelligence officials have said run disinformation operations across the world’s largest social networks.

“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.

U.S. authorities have recently clamped down on RT for trying to interfere in the presidential election in November. On Friday, the United States - along with Canada and Britain - accused RT of acting as an arm of Russia’s intelligence agencies and announced new sanctions meant to cut off international financing for disinformation operations around the world.

That followed the federal indictment of two RT employees for funneling at least US$9.7mil to bankroll American podcasters on Tenet Media, a video-streaming site in Tennessee, in hopes of pushing the Kremlin’s propaganda and undermining the American democratic political process.

“We’re exposing how Russia deploys similar tactics around the world,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Friday. “Russian weaponisation of disinformation to subvert and polarize free and open societies extends to every part of the world.”

On Tuesday, a YouTube spokesperson said that to comply with US government sanctions, the video platform removed “over 230 channels affiliated with AVO TV Novosti,” the owner of RT, and Rossiya Segodnya, which owns Sputnik. YouTube added that in March 2022, it blocked Russian state-sponsored news channels globally and blocked viewers from watching the 230 channels that it now terminated.

The Biden administration has been intensifying its efforts to thwart Russia’s influence operations before the presidential election. US intelligence officials have said that the Kremlin is seeking to bolster former President Donald Trump’s campaign, angered by the Biden administration’s support for Ukraine.

On Wednesday, the Senate Intelligence Committee plans to hold a hearing on foreign threats to the election. Lawmakers are scheduled to question Nick Clegg, the president of global affairs at Meta, about foreign interference on the company’s platforms, as well as top executives from Google and Microsoft.

Since the 2016 election, Meta has kept a closer eye on the activities of foreign governments that have misused the company’s apps to spread propaganda and inflame voters. The company was accused that year of allowing Russians to effectively broadcast divisive messaging on Facebook and Instagram, influencing the outcome of the election.

In 2020, Meta called out Russia specifically for its practices, and in 2022 took actions to limit the spread of Russian state controlled media messaging. That included blocking the outlets from running ads globally, and pushing their posts lower in Facebook and Instagram feeds so it was less likely that users would see them. Meta now regularly releases reports on foreign disinformation campaigns and removes them from its platforms if it finds them.

Meta is not the first company to bar Russian media outlets. The bans have been sporadically effective, though the media sites have continued to find workarounds to spread their messaging.

Over the past 18 months, Meta has moved to distance itself from the spread of political posts across its platforms, at the order of Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s CEO. That has resulted in fewer publicly visible posts about news and social issues, the company has said. Meta executives have said its users wish to see fewer political posts across its apps.

 - NY Times