The European Union said it would ban Kremlin-based media outlets, including Russia Today and Sputnik, and extend measures against the country.
The EU said that the state-owned Russia Today and Sputnik will no longer be able to spread their lies to justify Putin's war.
There are still no details on the EU's planned ban on Russian state media.
At the time of writing EU officials were unable to confirm if the ban would apply to online platforms such as YouTube, where Sputnik andRT have a number of channels, and the US platform.
In the past few hours EU officials have been pressing mainstream tech platforms on the issue of misinformation.
The values and transparency commissioner, Vera Jourova, and the internal market commissioner, Thierry Breton, had spoken to the CEOs of the two video-sharing websites to encourage them to fight Russian propaganda.
The demonetization of Russian-backed channels means they can no longer receive ad revenue from its platforms or ad networks. In a video call with the two tech CEOs, it was reported that they need to go further.
War propaganda does not cover freedom of expression. The commissioner said in a statement after the call that for too long, content from Russia Today and other Russian state media has been amplified by a recommendation system.
War propaganda should not have a place on online platforms. I am confident that the tech industry will take effective measures to counter misinformation.
Josep Borrell, the EU's high commissioner for foreign affairs, was asked by the BBC if the ban will apply online, but he refused to specify.
He told the Today program that they would do everything they could to prevent toxic content from reaching a European audience.
He said the two channels do not distribute free information but rather pump it out.
If you start telling lies all the time, it has to be forbidden.
The EU's previous proposals for dealing with online disinformation have mostly focused on getting voluntary buy-in from the tech sphere. It has been pressing for tougher action in recent years, especially around COVID-19 disinformation, which presents a clear public safety danger.
A ban on media entities that are clearly linked to the Kremlin is a departure from the Commission's usual script.
Russia Today's main channel has over 4 million subscribers on YouTube, but its content can be found far more widely across the platform.
The channel's marketing claims that it is the most watched news network on YouTube with 10 billion views, which is a little odd.
The screengrab is from TechCrunch.
The EU banned the Kremlin-backed media channels, so we asked if they would take further action against them.
We will update this report if the company responds.
The infowars tactics of the Kremlin are far more extensive online, where multiple user generated platforms give Putin with unlimited opportunities to pass his propaganda.
Even if the EU tries to force mainstream platforms to ban Sputnik, it won't be able to stop the Kremlin's propaganda machine.
The Internet Research Agency, a notorious Russian troll factory, was added to the expanded list of sanctions by the EU at the weekend.
Even if it is the most well known troll farm, it isn't likely to be the only one. Russian's web brigade has been accused of using outsourcing tactics to try to better cover its tracks.
In a small sign of some of the less visible Kremlin-backed propaganda activity dialling up around the Ukraine war, Facebook's parent company Meta put out an update today.
Meta said the Russian network it identified had been reporting Ukrainians for violating its policies on coordinated inauthentic behavior, including by posing as independent news outlets.
They ran websites posing as independent news entities and created fake personas across social media platforms.
They were based in Russia and targeted people in Ukranian across multiple social media platforms. We took down this operation, blocked their domain from being shared on our platform, and shared information with other tech platforms. When we disrupted this network on our platform, it had less than 4,000 Facebook accounts following one of its Pages and less than 500 accounts following one or more of its other accounts.
Some of the accounts it found using fictitious personas had also used profile pictures which are suggested to be generated using artificial intelligence techniques.
They pretended to be news editors, a former aviation engineer, and an author of a scientific publication on hydrography, and they were based in Kyiv. The operation ran a number of websites that were masquerading as independent news outlets, publishing claims about the West betraying Ukraine and Ukraine being a failed state.
Our investigation is ongoing, and so far we have found links between this network and another operation we removed in April 2020, which we then connected to individuals in Russia, the Donbass region in Ukraine and two media organizations.
Ghostwriter, a threat actor it notes has been tracked, has been targeting people in Ukraine, including Ukrainian military and public figures.
We detected attempts to target people on Facebook to post videos portraying Ukrainian troops as weak and surrendering to Russia, including one video that claimed to show Ukrainian soldiers coming out of a forest while flying a white flag of surrender. Phishing domains used to be blocked by us.
When we asked if it had taken action against Russians on its platform since the invasion, it confirmed that it had.
A person from the social network told us.
“On Feb. 27, we permanently suspended more than a dozen accounts and blocked the sharing of several links in violation of our platform manipulation and spam policy. Our investigation is ongoing; however, our initial findings indicate that the accounts and links originated in Russia and were attempting to disrupt the public conversation around the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. As is standard, further details will be shared through our information operations archive once complete.”
As the situation in Ukraine develops, it will be monitoring its platform for emerging narratives that violate platform rules, such as rules of synthetic and manipulated media and its platform manipulation policy.
State-affiliated accounts belonging to the Russian Federation are already labeled by the platform.
The state internet regulator appears to have retaliated over the fact-checking labels Facebook had placed on four Kremlin-linked media firms.
Following street protests against the war, access to its service in Russia was restricted.
People should be cautious about accepting friend requests from people they don't know, as well as implementing 2FA on their accounts, in light of the threat posed by Russian cyberops.
At the time of writing, TikTok had not responded to our questions about whether it had taken any measures against Russian propaganda.
The Russian military has been using TikTok in recent years as Putin's propaganda tacticians used the platform to show off their power to the world.
The Russian military's anti-Ukraine tactic appears to have failed to hit the mark.
TikTok emerges as a political battleground in Navalny-stirred Russia
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