The Russian state media RT and Sputnik have already been blocked within the EU – now the big tech companies are following suit. Facebook, TikTok and Microsoft also want to block access to the news offerings.
The war in Ukraine is also being waged as an information war in the media. Russia, in particular, is attempting to use the government-controlled media to glorify its war of aggression as a justified military operation.
For this reason, EU countries have already banned the distribution of the two Russian state media, RT and Sputnik.
Now the big tech companies are also joining the blockade. On Tuesday morning, for example, a YouTube spokesman said: “Due to the ongoing war in Ukraine, we are blocking YouTube channels connected to RT and Sputnik in Europe with immediate effect.”
However, the technical implementation will take a while. YouTube had already blocked the RT channel last year for violating company guidelines.
Microsoft and TikTok are following suit
Facebook’s head of global affairs, Nick Clegg, tweeted on Tuesday night that they had received requests from EU states to take further steps against Russian state media. Therefore, access to RT and Sputnik will now be blocked across the EU.
Facebook had already announced on Sunday that access to numerous accounts – including those belonging to some Russian state media – had been restricted in Ukraine.
The Chinese company TikTok also told the US radio station “NPR” that the pages and content of RT and Sputnik were blocked within the EU.
Microsoft had already announced on Monday that the RT-News-App from their own app store and no longer show content from RT or Sputnik in the news feeds of Windows and MSN.com. In addition, search results for RT and Sputnik would be sorted further down on Microsoft’s Bing search engine.
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