Roskomnadzor announced a “partial restriction of access” to Facebook in Russia. Soon, the agency updated the message and clarified that it would be about slowing down traffic, as with Twitter in 2021.
The sanction was explained by the fact that Facebook “restricted” the accounts of four publications due to the fact that it was marked as unreliable several posts of the military TV channel Zvezda, RIA Novosti, Lenta.ru and Gazeta.ru.
Roskomnadzor also claimed that they were «imposed technical restrictions on the search results of publications to reduce the audience.»
The Zvezda channel wrote that this affected posts with two of their news. The preview of the news link in the post was blurred and read “False information. Reviewed by independent fact-checkers.” In this case, the link could be followed.
The publications did not provide confirmation that such posts were given out to users less. Facebook developers, introducing the fact-checking system on the social network in 2017, wrote that the very labeling of fake materials “will limit [their] distribution.”
Meta refused to remove warnings about «false information» under the threat of blocking from Roskomnadzor. type=»photo» data-slate-custom=»{«src»:»https://s3.zona.media/entry/74ddf225e2937b9cac2cd2d026cc5157″,»alt»:»»,»imgSrc»: "https://s3.zona.media/entry/74ddf225e2937b9cac2cd2d026cc5157","migrationId":"1553087251646","html":null}» alt=»1″ />
< p> In March 2021, Roskomnadzor began to slow down the upload of photos and videos on Twitter. The reason was 3,000 materials that Twitter did not remove at the request of the Russian authorities. It was about “100% traffic slowdown” of mobile communications and “50% of fixed communications”. After negotiations with Twitter management, the agency left traffic slowdown only on smartphones.
Updated at 22:00 and 23:32. Added a Meta comment and information about applying traffic slowdown to Facebook. In connection with the latter, the title has been changed.