Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook’s parent company, Meta, stated on Tuesday that social media poses a threat to dictators, which is why Russian President Vladimir Putin blocked Facebook access. “Social media is bad for dictators” she said at an International Women’s day event when she was interviewed by CNBC’s Hadley Gambleat.
According to Meta’s vice president of global relations, Nick Clegg, Russian authorities first asked the platform to stop fact-checking and labeling content shared on Facebook by state-owned publications like RT and Sputnik. That request was turned down by Meta.
One of the reasons Russia stopped Facebook, according to Sandberg, was because the social media network refused to stop labeling content from state media with fact-checks. Since the 2016 US election, when Russian disinformation efforts were discovered to have targeted US users, Russian misinformation on Facebook has been a sensitive subject for Meta.
Sandberg believes the world would be “safer” and “far more prosperous” if half of the world’s leaders were women. According to the Meta executive, women-led countries like New Zealand fared better in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic than their male-led rivals.
Since February 26, Russians’ access to Twitter has been blocked, and TikTok announced that it would cease all live streaming and content sharing in Russia in reaction to the country’s new “fake news” law.
Roskomnadzor did not say whether Meta’s other platforms, Instagram and WhatsApp, would be blocked as well. Following the ban by Roskomnadzor, Meta halted all Russian advertising and barred Russian companies from purchasing ads for placement anywhere in the world.
On Friday, Meta declared that it was censoring RT and Sputnik in the UK. This came after a request by the cultural secretary, Nadine Dorries, in a letter to TikTok, Twitter, and Meta the day before. These news organizations were already on Meta’s blacklist across the EU.
While big digital companies do not have a good track record when it comes to standing up to Russia, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have all recently taken steps to restrict state-run media channels like RT and Sputnik from their platforms.
