Facebook Just Did Something Utterly Unprecedented
Facebook Just Did Something Utterly Unprecedented
This marks a major shift by the US giant.
Facebook isn’t exactly known for being a morally sound company. It has a near-endless list of controversies and questionable policies. Not only that, but the firm has avoided taking accountability and resisted change for well over a decade. It stood as a giant, sprawling, unprincipled monolith in a digital landscape. But now that has changed. You see, Meta (Facebook’s parent company) has just banned Russia Today (RT), Rossiya Segodnya, and Russian state media networks from all of its apps globally. Why? Well, Meta alleges the accounts used deceptive tactics to carry out state-backed influence operations (also known as propaganda) while evading detection on the social media company’s platforms. Meta has never enforced such a widespread ban before. So why have they changed their approach so drastically? And why now?
At first, I thought this resulted from the recent actions against Tenet Media.
A recent indictment accused state broadcaster RT, formerly Russia Today, of paying the US-based media firm Tenet $10m (£7.6m) to “create and distribute content to US audiences with hidden Russian government messaging.” The company then used this money to pay right-wing social media commentators, namely Tim Pool, David Rubin, and Benny Johnson, to spread demonstrably false pro-Russian misinformation. This violates numerous laws, such as those regarding money laundering and the use of foreign agents. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has stated this indictment shows how RT and, in turn, Tenet had been “functioning like a de facto arm of Russia’s intelligence apparatus.”
However, I’m not convinced this is why Meta banned Russian state-owned media from its apps. For one, instigating the ban would be functionally useless, given that the ban wouldn’t affect the likes of Tim Pool, David Rubin, Benny Johnson, or anyone else who has been, or will be, paid by the Russian state to produce media. What’s more, it’s not like these indictments are anything particularly fresh or surprising.
It is now widely accepted that Russia’s actions via Facebook had a significant influence over the 2016 US Presidential Election and the 2016 UK Brexit vote. In both cases, Russia didn’t achieve this feat by using paid adverts on the platform but instead through their state-owned media, bots, paid agents, and influence through media personalities. Facebook has even admitted to this, acknowledging that Russia-backed content reached over 126 million Americans on Facebook during and after the 2016 presidential election. During this time, Facebook found 120 fake Russian-backed pages that created 80,000 posts seen by 29 million US citizens, who then shared them with even more people by liking, forwarding, and commenting on these posts. The vast majority of this content was propaganda designed to sway the US election and political discourse to Russia’s advantage. This notion was supported by a 2018 report that found that Russia used every major social media network to influence the 2016 presidential election and spread pro-Russian propaganda. They did so by making incendiary and false claims about immigration, race, and gun rights to incite the right-wing to vote in Russia’s favour. In many ways, this report demonstrated that Russia is the main reason the US’s current political landscape has become so extreme, divided, and unfounded in reality.
Yet, when all of this came to light, Facebook only limited, not banned, Russian state-owned media on its apps. These social media accounts were still allowed to operate, and a lot of their content was still able to go viral, particularly surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and the ongoing one-sided war in Gaza.
So, what has changed? Why are they suddenly so keen to stomp out foreign propaganda, which they enabled and profited from for more than a decade?
Truth be told, I think it has far more to do with Western governments clamping down on social media companies, and due to the current situation involving Tenet, kicking Russian media off their platforms now offers better optics than doing so at a random time.
As it stands, the EU, UK, and Australian governments, just to name a few, are introducing or have introduced legislation to fine, restrict, or levy charges against social media companies that enable and spread misinformation and foreign propaganda. In fact, the EU is currently in the process of doing this to Musk’s X, in which they could levy huge fines against the platform, as the platform currently has the highest levels of Russian propaganda of any site. Just to give you a sense of how serious these fines are, Australia is in the process of creating legislation that would fine a social media company 5% of its global revenue if they are found to be in breach of its misinformation laws. If Meta is found guilty of this, then Australia alone could fine them over $6.7 billion!
Why are these governments taking such drastic action? Well, the major social media platforms’ lax approaches to moderation and enabling (and profiting) from Russian propaganda have fuelled diplomatic chaos in these countries. Not only is this misleading Russian media having a catastrophic impact on their elections, but they are also devolving their political environments, inciting widespread hate crimes, and dividing once cooperative societies. As such, the governments are looking to protect their country, democracy, and citizens from this damaging practice.
For Meta’s apps, such as Facebook and Instagram, to abide by these new laws and not be fined to oblivion, they need to entirely ban the foreign agents and propaganda-spewing state media who have called their sites home for over a decade. But, banning them out of the blue would have caused an enormous backlash, particularly among the right-wing media, who are currently obsessed with the notion of “free speech” (even though they don’t actually understand what free speech entails; read more here). But the Tenet Media indictment has changed this. US right-wing media is desperately trying to avoid any ties to Russian state media, and so is avoiding the topic altogether. What’s more, they have toned down their misinformed “free speech” rhetoric, as this highlights the glaring flaw in the ideology they were pushing.
As such, I think the only reason Meta has changed its ways so drastically is because of public optics thanks to the Tenet Media revelations and a looming legal action against the company, which could sink it. It is an act of survival, not one of morality. How utterly pathetic.
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Sources: The Guardian, BBC, The Guardian, Time, New Yorker, BBC, Politico, Reuters, Reuters, CSIS