Roskomnadzor, Russia’s state-owned media agency, said that Instagram will be banned in the country owing to “calls for violence” against Russian soldiers and President Vladimir Putin, amidst the country’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
On Friday, the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office also called for a criminal investigation against Meta citing Russian propaganda and extremism laws.
Further, the Russian Embassy in the US has demanded authorities stop the “extremist activities” and take measures to “bring the perpetrators to justice.”
“We demand that authorities stop the extremist activities of Meta, take measures to bring the perpetrators to justice. Users of Facebook and Instagram did not give the owners of these platforms the right to determine the criteria of truth and pit nations against each other,” the Russian Embassy in US tweeted on Friday.
The social media platform, on Thursday, reportedly said that in a temporary change to its hate speech policy, it will allow users of Facebook and Instagram in some countries to “call for violence” against Russian soldiers and Putin.
Meta is also temporarily allowing some posts that “call for death” to Putin or Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, according to the internal emails to its content moderators.
“As a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we have temporarily made allowances for forms of political expression that would normally violate our rules like violent speech such as ‘death to the Russian invaders.’ We still won’t allow credible calls for violence against Russian civilians,” stated a Meta spokesperson.
In a recent change to Meta’s rules on violence and incitement, as per an email, the aforementioned calls will be allowed unless they contain other targets or have two indicators of credibility, including the location or method.
“We are issuing a spirit-of-the-policy allowance to allow T1 violent speech that would otherwise be removed under the Hate Speech policy when: (a) targeting Russian soldiers, EXCEPT prisoners of war, or (b) targeting Russians where it’s clear that the context is the Russian invasion of Ukraine (e.g., content mentions the invasion, self-defense, etc.),” read the email.
It further stated that they are doing this because they have observed that “in this specific context, ‘Russian soldiers’ is being used as a proxy for the Russian military.”
“The Hate Speech policy continues to prohibit attacks on Russians,” the email added.
The temporary policy changes also apply to Armenia, Azerbaijan, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, and Ukraine.
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Sharing the tweet by Russian Embassy in US, its India office wrote, “Noted the Reuters message that Meta permitted to post calls for violence against the Russian leadership & our military personnel on Facebook & Instagram.”
Recently last week, Russia had said that it was banning Facebook in the country, as a response to what it said were restrictions of access to Russian media on the platform.