By Elizabeth Culliford

NEW YORK/MOSCOW – While Russian missiles rained on Ukrainian cities in the east, another battle took over online and via the airwaves.

Moscow increased its control over the news media narrative, and big tech companies Alphabet and Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ:) Inc placed restrictions on Russia’s state media outlets in Ukraine.

Russia has announced that it is going to partially block Facebook (NASDAQ 🙂 on Friday. This was after Meta refused a request from the Russian government to stop independent fact checking of various Russian state media outlets. Twitter (NYSE 🙂 stated on Saturday that some Russian users were being denied access to its services.

Users reported that Facebook Messenger was slow to load images and videos after the slowdown. Twitter was slow on mobile devices – the site has suffered a severe slowdown ever since March. In recent days, many state websites including kremlin.ru have experienced outages.

This standoff for the tech companies is just the latest stage in an ongoing conflict with Russia. It places platforms at risk of government-imposed restrictions in Russia as it seeks censor dissidents, while also protecting state-run media.

Social, video, and livestreaming giants like Facebook and Twitch face increasing pressure to correct falsehoods and spread misleading content on their platforms.

This latest Russian clash with tech happens just days after Moscow gave major tech companies a deadline to adhere to a new law. The law requires foreign firms to establish official representations in Russia, which may make it easier for Russia to control platforms. The move follows a string of slowdowns and penalties imposed by the Russian government on platforms that failed to remove any illegal content.

Roskomnadzor’s online database showed that Apple (NASDAQ:), Spotify(NYSE:), and Viber fulfilled the three conditions of law by Sunday, March 31st. The requirements include registering with the regulator and giving users an opportunity to directly communicate with the company.

Russia has threatened to ban advertising from companies if they don’t comply with its demands. Russian officials said that there could be further restrictions, including speed limits or blocks.

The burden for big tech companies is also to deal with demands by Ukrainian officials and sympathizers around the world who want them to remove Russian users from their service to end the spread of false news, as well as to preserve the dissidents’ access to essential digital tools.

Mark Zuckerberg: Russia is ruining real life in Ukraine, as you create Metaverse. Please ban @facebookapp access from Russia. We also ask that you stop @instagram and @instagram being used in Russia. Mykhailo Fedorov was the Ukrainian vice prime minister and wrote on Twitter Sunday.

Meta’s global affairs head Nick Clegg responded to these demands by tweeting Sunday that shutting down Instagram and Facebook in Russia “silences important expressions at a critical time.”

There were many other tech professionals facing similar problems. Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram said that they would not restrict certain channels to spread false information after reading a Sunday post. This was just minutes after Durov had stated in an earlier posting that Telegram would be considering this.

RESTRICTIONS

The conflict that has erupted between Moscow and the major tech platforms and the EU was mainly due to the activities of state-controlled media like RT and Sputnik. On Sunday, activists and politicians demanded that the Kremlin sanction these outlets.

Roskomnadzor told local media that it had “false info” on Moscow’s military operation. The Roskomnadzor also prohibited the use “invasion” or “assault”, to describe Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Russian tech giant Yandex (NASDAQ) also warned Russian internet users who search for Ukraine news on their search engine of unreliable sources.

Russia describes its actions as “special operation”. It says they are not intended to occupy territory, but destroy Ukraine’s military capability and capture people it considers dangerous nationalists. This is something that the government of Kyiv and other Western countries have long criticized.

In the midst of Russia’s invasion Facebook, Twitter and Google, as well as YouTube, took new steps to prevent Russian state media making any money through ads. Twitter banned state-backed media ads in 2019 and said that it had paused all ads in Russia, Ukraine in order to protect public safety information. Google, which is the largest online ad marketplace, stated that it does not permit Russian state media outlets to sell advertising using its tools.

Facebook and Google said that they have restricted access to certain state media accounts in Ukraine, at the request from the Ukrainian government. Google stated on Sunday that it had stopped downloading RT’s mobile application in Ukraine as a response to a government request.

Experts predict that the battle between Russia, the largest tech firms and Western businesses will intensify as Western companies start to pay attention to new economic sanctions and increase pressure to counter online disinformation.