The Russian invasion of Ukraine has forced social media giants to do something they once considered unthinkable: abandon their free-speech ethos and pick a side.
What first started as a trickle — stopping Kremlin-backed media outlets from buying ads on Facebook and YouTube — has turned within days into a flood of restrictions aimed at throttling the Kremlin's use of the online world for political and military gain.
Pleas from leaders in Ukraine, Europe and elsewhere prompted fierce arguments within the companies about whether it would betray their commitment to free expression if they banned Russian media outlets, according to people who attended internal meetings. As the political and public clamor for action increased, the executives made calls that went further in curbing Moscow’s online influence campaigns than many had initially considered possible.
The implications will be long-lasting. By taking action against the Kremlin, tech companies have adopted policies that could become the de facto norm for future conflicts. These decisions could fundamentally change the companies’ relationships with governments that are being forced, in real time, to acknowledge the power that social media wields in a time of war.
It "is quite a difficult balancing trick for us," Nick Clegg, the vice president of global affairs at Facebook’s parent Meta, told reporters Tuesday when asked about how the social media giant was balancing demands from vying governments. The former British deputy prime minister said the company's priority was to keep its services available, in both Russia and Ukraine.
"We're a company. We're not a government," said Clegg. "But we're also aware that we're in a completely unprecedented situation, and this is a highly exceptional and tragic state of affairs."
Meta and TikTok banned Russian state media organizations earlier this week from using their platforms within the European Union after officials pressured the companies to act. YouTube followed suit Tuesday, expanding that ban to include both the 27-country bloc and the United Kingdom. Twitter tweaked its algorithms to limit the spread of Russian government talking points and propaganda on its network worldwide.
Scores of other tech companies — from chip maker Intel to hardware giants like Apple to gig economy firms like Uber to the video-streaming giant Netflix — have either cut ties with Russia or pushed back against Kremlin control in a global show of solidarity with Ukraine. But the social media platforms’ decisions are particularly consequential because of their central role in the information warfare that is playing out across their platforms.
Many of the world’s biggest online firms, including Facebook and Google, were born in the post-Cold War era — a time when relative peace among the great powers allowed Silicon Valley to promote itself as the neutral steward of a global marketplace of ideas. Now, the rekindling of tensions between the West and Russia has left the companies stumbling to respond — despite years of increasing scrutiny over how domestic and international actors are using their platforms to peddle falsehoods.
In hastily arranged Zoom calls soon after Russian forces entered Ukraine last week, tech executives at Google, Facebook and Twitter debated the pros and cons of banning media outlets with ties to the Russian government, as well as other misinformation with potential ties to the Kremlin, according to six people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal meetings.
Some argued the need to uphold freedom of speech principles to allow Russians access to independent information. Others called for outright bans in response to the Ukrainian invasion — citing direct appeals from Kyiv and other national capitals for these companies to act.
The back-and-forth highlights the inner tensions at the world's largest tech companies as they’ve transformed into global gatekeepers with power equal, or sometimes greater than, nation-states. The biggest social media companies can cut off governments’ online footprints with a few clicks.
Companies like Facebook and Twitter have wielded such power before, in piecemeal fashion, including when they ousted then-President Donald Trump from their platforms after he encouraged supporters who ransacked the U.S. Capitol in January 2021. Those actions have prompted fierce attacks from Republicans in the U.S. — including some who are now pushing for the companies to cut off access to Russian government outlets.
Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), the top Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, specifically called for Twitter to shut down the Kremlin’s official account and TikTok to block Russian-backed media from the platform. She had previously criticized the companies' actions to remove Trump.
“Part of my goal is to highlight the discrepancy, the lack of consistency in their current practices,” she told reporters Tuesday. “They got compelled to take down President Trump and other conservative elected officials in America, and yet they’re not taking action against the aggression of Russia right now.”
Free speech advocates — including those within Russia — also raised concerns that the platforms’ efforts to ban or clamp down on pro-Kremlin propaganda could lead to greater censorship in other non-democratic countries, while cutting off many from independent sources of information.
“These companies are between the devil and the deep blue sea,” said Nikita Istomin, a digital rights lawyer at Roskomsvoboda, a Russian nonprofit, referring to the platforms' efforts to balance Western demands with keeping their services available within the country.
Rebecca MacKinnon, vice president of global advocacy at Wikimedia Foundation, warned against the slippery slope of cutting off social media access to all citizens in a country where not everyone shared the views of the autocratic government.
“That's just going to divide the world further and it's basically abandoning full segments of the world's population and kind of giving up on them,” she said.
Tech companies’ struggle to respond to this new reality began at the very start of the Russian invasion — an all-out attack whose size and ambition caught some Western intelligence agencies by surprise.
In the days after the tanks started rolling, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube fell back on the same kinds of playbooks that they had used after crises such as the January 2021 attack on the Capitol, according to three of the tech executives who spoke to POLITICO on the condition of anonymity.
The companies’ actions initially included stopping Russian-linked media organizations from running ads online — a response to Western sanctions that cut off Moscow from the world's financial systems. They also created internal teams of native Ukrainian and Russian speakers to keep tabs on how disinformation and Kremlin propaganda was circulating online, and worked with independent fact-checkers to promote authoritative voices about the war.
"We thought we had a game plan for how to respond," said one of the executives, who was not authorized to speak publicly about their company's internal deliberations. "We knew something may happen in Ukraine. We weren't prepared for what's happened since last week."
A major turning point was a flood of letters that Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine's minister of digital transformation, sent to tech CEOs on Saturday.
In direct pleas to Google, YouTube, Apple and Netflix, he called on them to block or limit their Russian services to put pressure on Moscow. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine's president, has also used his large social media following to highlight his country's situation in a direct plea with people across the West.
"In 2022, modern technology is perhaps the best answer to the tanks, multiple-rocket launchers and missiles," Fedorov wrote to Tim Cook, Apple's boss.
Western officials quickly jumped into the fray.
The prime ministers of Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — countries bordering either Russia or Ukraine — sent an open letter to Twitter, Meta and Google demanding a clampdown on Russian disinformation on their platforms. The EU also imposed travel bans on, and froze the assets of, Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of the English-language broadcaster RT, as well as the Internet Research Agency, a St. Petersburg-based group associated with hostile propaganda spread on social media.
Thierry Breton, the European Commission's internal market commissioner, held virtual calls with Sundar Pichai, Google's chief executive, and Susan Wojcicki, YouTube's boss, urging them to take further steps against Russian disinformation. Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), chair of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee, also urged the video-streaming service to stop selling ads on channels operated by the Kremlin.
Yet within the tech companies, executives expressed frustration that governments wanted them to move aggressively against Russia's online activities, but had failed to provide the companies with legal pretext that would give them political cover against potential Kremlin retaliation.
After European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen posted on Twitter that the bloc planned to ban RT and Sputnik — two networks of international media organizations with direct ties to Moscow — lawyers inside Meta and Google argued on Zoom calls that her announcement was not based in EU law. The companies argued that before they could take action beyond their terms of service, countries’ independent regulators and national governments would need to agree to such a ban, according to three executives and officials with direct knowledge of the matter.
Eventually, Clegg announced Monday that Meta had banned Russia's state media from Facebook and Instagram within the 27-country bloc after "requests from a number of governments and the EU to take further steps." Google said it had banned the same outlets due to the ongoing war in Ukraine.
Complicating matters, American officials have urged social media companies to hold off platform-wide bans of Russian media, arguing that the need to uphold free expression and allow Russians to access Western news — in case Moscow retaliates against U.S and European outlets — was more important than arbitrary bans on these Kremlin networks. Clegg said the U.S. government had not asked the social networking giant to block Russian state media.
The U.S. State Department said it does not request specific actions like the removal or labeling of content from social media platforms, according to a senior official. Content actions are independently determined and made by the platforms, in accordance with their terms of service, the official added. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations.
Tyson Barker, a former State Department official, said a lack of a coordinated response — by both Western governments and tech companies — had made the digital response to the war in Ukraine patchy, at best.
Companies moved against Russia's online activities in varying degrees, and the European response was more heavy-handed than that of Washington — often undermining a joint response to the Kremlin's online tactics, he argued.
"Everyone is acting in a haphazard way," said Barker, who now heads the technology and global affairs program at the German Council on Foreign Relations, a Berlin-based think tank. Barker noted that both companies and governments have had years to prepare for such conflict-zone crises. "It's like they are trying to build the plane in mid-flight. So far, the response to Russia has been pretty arbitrary."
Vincent Manancourt contributed to this report.
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By: Mark Scott and Rebecca Kern
Title: Social media goes to war
Sourced From: www.politico.com/news/2022/03/02/social-media-goes-to-war-00012993
Published Date: Wed, 02 Mar 2022 04:31:00 EST
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