During the invasion of Ukraine, Meta has been trying to prove itself.
The steps that Meta would be taking in response to the crisis were outlined quickly. The president of global policy at the company announced that it was setting up a team to tackle misinformation and hate speech as well as fact-check and tag any false Russian state-media the same day Russian troops rolled into Ukraine.
Russia has hit back at Meta, blocking all access to Facebook in Russia last week and moving this week to designate Meta as an Extremist organization.
Russia took Facebook down because it posed a threat, according to the COO of Meta.
Putin took us down because social media is bad for dictators.
The claim is that Facebook and its parent company Meta are against authoritarian rulers and governments. Facebook has a history of being used by Russian disinformation campaigns, so locking horns with the Kremlin provides a handy redemption path for the company.
Facebook is not necessarily a foil for dictators everywhere.
Professor Dina Matar, an expert in politics, communications, and media at the SOAS University of London, told Insider that whether or not Facebook is good for dictators is debatable and rather an overstatement of the alleged importance or threat of Facebook.
She said that historically speaking, authoritarian leaders have always shut down Facebook during times of crisis or when their power was challenged.
Matar said that Facebook collaborated with authoritarianism by blocking some users, including those fighting for human rights.
Professor Charlie Beckett, a specialist in media and journalism at the London School of Economics, told Insider that social media is bad for dictators, but that it can be weaponized by anti-democratic forces.
Both Beckett and Matar pointed out that Facebook was used by the state to perpetrate violence against the Muslim population.
Meta says it has improved its systems significantly since then, and the company's former head of counterterrorism policy, Brian Fishman, told Protocol in an interview this week: "Facebook is way better at dealing with crises today than they were when I first got there."
Matar pointed to a report from 2020 that said tech companies such as Facebook and Google were playing a role in the Vietnam censorship campaign.
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, a psychologist at University College London, said that social media has pros and cons.
He said social media provides dictators with an easy way to promote their own personality cult as well as provide a tool for surveilling citizens.
Beckett said taking a hard line against Russia is easy for Facebook to do.
Meta's approach to Putin doesn't necessarily tell us whether it will take an equally strong stand against other regimes.
There is a populist government in Poland that has brought in laws against gay rights. He said that you can talk about a dictator that invades another country, but what about other authoritarian regimes.
Is it only dictators that invade other democracies?
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