RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan has acknowledged that she has learned from the West when it comes to information warfare, but stressed she would never stoop to the “hidden propaganda of Nazism,” which she alleges is a tactic used by the US and its allies.
Simonyan gave a lengthy interview to the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper on Tuesday, a week after US tech giant Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, announced the deplatforming of several Russian networks, including RT. Meta has accused the outlets in question of “foreign interference activity,” following similar allegations from the US State Department.
“We will never adopt direct or indirect harm to ordinary people. And we will never adopt forbidden moves like the hidden propaganda of fascism, Nazism, which they do on a daily and hourly basis in different countries… The most blatant example of this is Ukraine, unfortunately,” Simonyan said.
RT is being targeted by Westerns nations “because they are fighting Russia,” Simonyan pointed out.“And Russia has a stable position in the international information space. And it is improving despite all their counteractions.”
“We find ways to bypass these sanctions. This is sort of a game of cat and mouse. And it will continue,” the RT editor-in-chief added.
The audience suffers most from the restrictions against RT, Simonyan argued. “These are millions of subscribers, who one morning lost their usual sources of information. But Meta does not give a damn about its subscribers. It has long become the left hind leg of the intelligence services and of what is called the ‘deep state’ in the US,” she said.
The clampdown by Meta was preceded by another round of sanctions against the Russian media by Washington. While announcing the curbs, US State Department spokesman Jamie Rubin blamed RT for the fact that “so much of the world has not been as fully supportive of Ukraine [during the conflict with Russia] as you would think they would be.”
“It was they who said it, not us,” Simonyan stressed as she commented on Rubin’s statement. “At that moment, I realized that my life was not in vain. For the first time in my life, I felt that,” she added.
The editor-in-chief stood by her previous claim that the West had been a “good teacher” for her when it comes to waging information war. However, she insisted that RT would never engage in “betrayal,” unlike the US and its allies.