A change to Meta’s content moderation policies allowing calls for violence against the Russian military may have spurred the move
Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri confirmed Russia’s impending block of Instagram in a tweet late Friday, writing, “On Monday, Instagram will be blocked in Russia. This decision will cut 80 million in Russia off from one another and from the rest of the world, as about 80% of people in Russia follow an Instagram account outside of their country. This is wrong.”
The Russian government began turning up the heat on Meta following a report by Reuters early Friday morning on a temporary change to its content moderation policies to allow calls for violence against the Russian military and the leaders of Russia and Belarus.
Meta president of global affairs Nick Clegg said in a tweet Friday afternoon, “I want to be crystal-clear: Our policies are focused on protecting people’s rights to speech as an expression of self-defense in reaction to a military invasion of their country. The fact is, if we applied our standard content policies without any adjustments, we would now be removing content from ordinary Ukrainians expressing their resistance and fury at the invading military forces, which would rightly be viewed as unacceptable.”
He added, “To be clear, we are only going to apply this policy in Ukraine itself. We have no quarrel with the Russian people. There is no change at all in our policies on hate speech as far as the Russian people are concerned. We will not tolerate Russophobia or any kind of discrimination, harassment or violence toward Russians on our platform.”
There were multiple reports from the war-torn region Friday morning that Roskomnadzor, the Russian state communications regulator, had begun the process of banning Meta-owned photo- and video-sharing platform Instagram and messaging application WhatsApp in the country, and that it was seeking to have Meta declared as an “extremist organization.”
Polina Ivanova, a correspondent covering Russia and Ukraine for The Financial Times, said in a tweet that Instagram is a source of income for many small businesses in the country, adding, “And for young Moscow elites, it’s … everything.”
Mary Ilyushina, a journalist based in Russia who works with CBS and The Washington Post, explained the importance of WhatsApp in a tweet, saying that it accounts for more than 60% of messenger internet traffic in Russia and noting that virtual private networks—a way to circumvent these bans—are not a familiar technology for many people in the country.
Russia appears to have pulled back on WhatsApp. Ilyushina reported that Sergey Boyarsky, deputy chairman of the information technology committee for the Russian state of Duma, said on state TV that all Meta services would soon be blocked in Russia, and that while Russians would miss those services, “We will get through this.” However, state news agency RIA Novosti reported shortly thereafter that WhatsApp is considered a “means of communication” and not a platform for “posting information,” so it would not be banned.
FT Moscow bureau chief Max Seddon discussed the implication of the potential declaration of Meta as an extremist organization, saying in a tweet, “Even in the context of wartime repression, this is astonishing—it basically likens Facebook to Al-Qaida.”
He also noted the importance of Instagram to small businesses in the country, and he said of banning foreign platforms, “It’s one thing to build a social network ecosystem from scratch, like in China, but when you don’t have enough replacements and people are used to foreign apps, banning them is much harder.”
According to digital and mobile intelligence provider Sensor Tower, based on installs from January 2014 to date, Russia is the No. 5 market for both Instagram and WhatsApp, and No. 20 for Facebook.
Sensor Tower said Instagram has been installed roughly 166 million times during that time period from the Apple App Store and Google Play, while those totals are 348.3 million for WhatsApp and 56.2 million for the flagship Facebook app.
The Reuters report that may have spurred or accelerated the move was initially interpreted as saying that Meta had decided to temporarily allow calls for violence against Russians, and both Reuters and Meta went on to issue clarifications.
A spokesperson for Meta told Reuters, “As a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we have temporarily made allowances for forms of political expression that would normally violate our rules like violent speech, such as, ‘Death to the Russian invaders.’ We still won’t allow credible calls for violence against Russian civilians.”
And Reuters noted that while Meta is temporarily allowing some posts that call for death to Russian President Vladimir Putin or Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, those posts cannot contain targets or indicators of credibility, such as location or method.
Reuters obtained an email Meta sent to moderators, which read, in part, “We are issuing a spirit-of-the-policy allowance to allow T1 violent speech that would otherwise be removed under the hate speech policy when: (a) targeting Russian soldiers, except prisoners of war, or (b) targeting Russians where it’s clear that the context is the Russian invasion of Ukraine (e.g., content mentions the invasion, self-defense, etc.), We are doing this because we have observed that in this specific context, ‘Russian soldiers’ is being used as a proxy for the Russian military. The hate speech policy continues to prohibit attacks on Russians.”
Roskomnadzor blocked access to Facebook and Twitter in Russia last week, in response to those social platforms’ decisions to restrict access to Russian state-owned media outlets such as RT and Sputnik
Clegg said at the time, “Soon, millions of ordinary Russians will find themselves cut off from reliable information, deprived of their everyday ways of connecting with family and friends and silenced from speaking out. We will continue to do everything we can to restore our services so they remain available to people to safely and securely express themselves and organize for action.”
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