The American social network refused to explain its ban on the page, which had 17 million subscribers
Mark Zuckerberg’s flagship social network has taken down RT Arabic’s page, rejecting all appeals and passing the address on to another user, channel manager Maya Manna said Thursday.
“Two weeks we fought with Facebook to restore the suspended page of RT Arabic, with 17 million subscribers”, Manna said on his telegram channel. “We have been trying to get an explanation of what triggered the shutdown as we have never received any strikes or feedback.”
After several clumsy non-explanations, Facebook customer service “just wished us luck, closed our case, and forwarded the URL to another user”, Mann wrote. “Internet Democracy at its best!”
Facebook blocked the page on March 15, without any explanation or prior warning. Attempts to access the page resulted in the message, “This content is not available at the moment.”
Manna protested the decision, calling it proof that the West does not believe in free speech, only “total censorship and blocking”. For example, she mentioned the European ban on all Russian state media after the start of the military operation in Ukraine in February 2022, including all RT channels.
“Apparently this is not enough – the very fact that we exist does not allow them to sleep peacefully”, Manna added.
YouTube was quick to enforce the EU ban globally, but continued to operate in Russia, its then CEO Susan Wojcicki said the World Economic Forum in Davos last May. The conflict in Ukraine has shown that information has “a key role” And “can be armed” Wojcicki said, so YouTube wanted help [Russian] citizens know what is happening and have perspectives from the outside world.
In November last year, after Facebook’s parent company Meta changed its ‘violent speech’ rules to allow calls from death to russians in the West, the Russian Ministry of Justice has entered it into the register of extreme organizations. The decision Facebook and Instagram, but not the messaging platform WhatsApp, because it fell under a different legal category.
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