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Facebook and Twitter were blocked on Friday in Russia, amid President Vladimir Putin’s military invasion of Ukraine.
In a statement published on Friday, Roskomnadzor, the state communications regulator, explained that the decision was made to “block access to the Facebook network” after at least 26 cases of “discrimination against Russian media and information sources” since October 2020. The agency highlighted the new Facebook restrictions on EU-wide Kremlin-linked media sources RT and Sputnik.
“Soon millions of ordinary Russians will find themselves untrustworthy, unable to connect with family and friends every day and unable to speak,” Nick Clegg, president of global affairs for Meta, Facebook’s parent company, wrote. on Twitter react. “We will continue to do everything we can to restore services so that they remain available for people to safely and securely express themselves and organize their actions.”
A few hours later, the Russian news agency Interfax reported that Roskomnadzor had also started blocking Twitter. Despite the reports, a Twitter spokesperson said the company did not see “anything significantly different” than the throttling it had previously reported.
The block would add to previous restrictions on Facebook and Twitter by the Kremlin. Last week, Clegg said Russia has restricted the use of the company’s services. The throttling was in response to Meta’s refusal to stop independent fact-checking of Russian state-backed media. Clegg also said that Meta will keep its apps, including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, available to Russians.
The Russian government also began throttling Twitter last week, and data from global internet monitor NetBlocks revealed the platform was restricted to some Russian telecommunications service providers. At that time, Twitter said it is aware of the limits and says it is “working to maintain [its] safe and accessible services.”
On Thursday, a Russian-language Twitter user since comment that Facebook, along with the BBC and the Russian news outlet Meduza, are blocked in Russia.
However, data from GlobalCheck, a service that tracks internet censorship in countries like Russia and Belarus, shows that Russia has been throttling Facebook. User connections to Facebook in Russia dropped by 25% that day, the platform’s lowest since the start of the invasion last month.
“This is precisely the ambiguity that throttling and partial restrictions aim for,” NetBlocks told BuzzFeed News on Thursday. “There is no clear point at which website slowdowns or social media platforms cannot be used. And in this regard, the act of throttling becomes a tool of information warfare in and of itself.
The Russian government has recently relied on throttling as a way to censor internet platforms. Last year, Roskomnadzor debuted a novel technique that effectively restricted access to Twitter during anti-Putin protests. Earlier, Roskomnadzor announced that it had slowed down the speed of Twitter services because it claimed that the company failed to remove content related to child pornography, drugs, and suicide. At the time, research group Censored Planet called it “the first centrally controlled attempt by the Russian government to use throttling (rather than outright blocking).”
As Russia continues to attack, Silicon Valley companies have been caught in the middle. Facebook and Twitter said they took down two anti-Ukraine disinformation campaigns over the weekend. Meta, TikTok, and YouTube, owned by Google, also banned Kremlin-backed outlets RT and Sputnik from their platforms in Europe. Reddit has banned users from posting links to Russian state-owned media. Apple and Google have also removed RT from app stores outside of Russia.
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