Facebook has blocked RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan's account for allegedly “violating community standards.” Revealing the ban, Simonyan complained of pervasive censorship practiced on the platform.
The three-day-long ban was not accompanied by a more detailed explanation, Simonyan said in her Telegram channel. She is trying to find out the exact reason, she added.
Meanwhile I'll be meditating on a free internet, freedom of speech and all that.
Facebook effectively allows Washington to spread its censorship beyond the American borders at will, Simonyan said. “Those who are young and live in social networks, think it's normal, and those who are older and in charge, don’t really get what it's all about most of the time. Me, I'm just sad,” she told Russia’s RIA news agency.
Facebook has recently faced increasing accusations of using vaguely-motivated bans to silence those veering from the US establishment’s outlook. Most recently, China complained about the social media giant supposedly censoring mainland Chinese people’s views on the Hong Kong protests after Facebook blocked some accounts supporting the Beijing-backed media campaign.
RT-affiliated media have faced this treatment, too. In February, Facebook blocked several RT-linked pages – InTheNow, Soapbox, Back Then and Waste-Ed – without prior notice, demanding their editors post data about their management and funding. The network then said it wanted the pages’ administrators to reveal their “ties to Russia” to their audience in the name of greater transparency, even though their relationships to RT and its video agency Ruptly had never been a secret.
Also on rt.com Facebook unblocks RT-linked pages but makes them comply with rules ‘no one else’ has to followIt's not just those with links to US adversaries like Russia or China who risk ending up on Facebook’s blacklists. Americans challenging the mainstream liberal narrative also risk getting blocked – at least for a brief period of time. This, for example, happened to conservative commentator Candace Owens in May when she said that “liberal” policies were supposedly doing more harm to black communities than white racism.
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