A Moscow court in Russia banned Facebook and Instagram on Monday after it described their parent company, the US IT giant Meta Platforms, as “extreme”.
The verdict, demanded by the Russian prosecutor’s office, took effect immediately. WhatsApp Messenger, also owned by Meta, is not affected by the verdict.
According to the HCLU, the case was filed by the Prosecutor General’s Office after the two community media lifted a ban on incitement to violence in several countries against Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian troops he had deployed to Ukraine on 24 February.
Monday’s court ruling banned Meta and its structures from doing business and operating offices in Russia. The ban affects Instagram and Facebook, which have already been blocked in the country by Russian media and telecommunications regulators (Roscomnadzor). The first is incitement to violence, the second is the blocking of Russian media.
According to the Russian Attorney General’s Office, Meta’s community sites have a major impact on public opinion, and the company itself has created an “alternative reality” in which it has incited hatred against Russians. Roscomnadzor drew attention to the fact that, following the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, 4,600 posts were published on Instagram spreading lies about the Russian army and more than 1,800 calls urging them to take part in unauthorized demonstrations.
The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) insisted on an immediate ban on the company because it said its activities were directed against Russia and its armed forces.
Meta Platforms requested that the hearing be adjourned and that a linguistic opinion be drawn up on the statements which gave rise to the Attorney General’s request, but received a negative reply. A Meta spokesman in court said the company had changed its policy and declared Russophobia and calls for violence against Russians unacceptable. He stressed that the presence of Russians on social networks, used by 2 billion people worldwide, is an important factor in global communication and business.
According to the grounds of the lawsuit, on March 11, the Meta allowed the publication on its pages of information calling for violence against the Russian army in connection with the war in Ukraine. Similar incitement against civilians is still prohibited.
The British news agency Reuters, the first to report on the case, wrote that calls for the killing of soldiers were authorized in 12 countries, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, and Ukraine. Incitement against Russian President Vladimir Putin and Belarusian President Lukashenko was allowed for users in Russia, Poland, and Ukraine.
The possibility of blocking Facebook arose as early as 2017 in Russia because the company did not comply with the law on the local storage of personal data. The court fined the social network several times, which also paid the fines.
In 2021, Facebook was fined 43 million rubles (the ruble is currently worth about 3.2 forints) for failing to remove illegal content in Russia. Of this fine, the company has already paid 26 million rubles. In October, Facebook and Instagram, albeit with a delay, deleted content banned in Russia. In December, Meta was fined for the first time with a negotiable fine of 1.99 billion rubles, which he did not pay.
The situation has been exacerbated by the atmosphere created by the war in Ukraine and Western sanctions. Meta’s social networks have banned Russian users from launching advertising campaigns, Instagram has stopped displaying information about users ’followers in Russia and Ukraine, and has begun tagging stories containing links to Russian state media in the Stories feature. Facebook has restricted access to RT, Sputnik, and other state-owned state media, among others.
Roscomnadzor demanded that Facebook lift the block and began slowing down on February 25, then completely blocking social network traffic on March 4th. On March 11, the Attorney General’s Office filed a lawsuit for declaring and banning Meta an extremist organization. The Committee of Inquiry (PC) has launched an investigation into calls for violence and the killing of Russians “by employees of an American company”. Instagram was blocked on March 14th.
Official comments say Facebook and Instagram users will not be prosecuted for extremism and will not be required to delete their profiles. Minority shareholders will not be considered accomplices of extremists either.
MTI
