RT Editor-in-Chief Simonyan blocked on Facebook - UPDATE: Account reinstated, no explanation provided

RT
Thu, 12 Sep 2019 19:20 UTC

© (L) Reuters / Dado Ruvic; (R) Sputnik

Facebook has blocked RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan's account for allegedly "violating community standards." Revealing the ban, Simonyan complained of pervasive censorship practiced on the platform.

The three-day-long ban was not accompanied by a more detailed explanation, Simonyan said in her Telegram channel. She is trying to find out the exact reason, she added.

"Meanwhile I'll be meditating on a free internet, freedom of speech and all that."

Facebook effectively allows Washington to spread its censorship beyond the American borders at will, Simonyan said. "Those who are young and live in social networks, think it's normal, and those who are older and in charge, don't really get what it's all about most of the time. Me, I'm just sad," she told Russia's RIA news agency.

Facebook has recently faced increasing accusations of using vaguely-motivated bans to silence those veering from the US establishment's outlook. Most recently, China complained about the social media giant supposedly censoring mainland Chinese people's views on the Hong Kong protests after Facebook blocked some accounts supporting the Beijing-backed media campaign.

RT-affiliated media have faced this treatment, too. In February, Facebook blocked several RT-linked pages - InTheNow, Soapbox, Back Then and Waste-Ed - without prior notice, demanding their editors post data about their management and funding. The network then said it wanted the pages' administrators to reveal their "ties to Russia" to their audience in the name of greater transparency, even though their relationships to RT and its video agency Ruptly had never been a secret.

It's not just those with links to US adversaries like Russia or China who risk ending up on Facebook's blacklists. Americans challenging the mainstream liberal narrative also risk getting blocked - at least for a brief period of time. This, for example, happened to conservative commentator Candace Owens in May when she said that "liberal" policies were supposedly doing more harm to black communities than white racism.

Comment: See also:

• Facebook Teams up With Mainstream Media to Directly Censor News Websites
• Social media: Can we take back power from the tech giants and their government overlords?

UPDATE: Saturday 14th September 2019

RT reports:

Facebook has lifted a ban on RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan's account after less than a day, imposed over an alleged breach of its rules. The US social media giant apologized, while saying the move was a "mistake."

"If we see that we have made an error we restore the deleted content and apologize for the mistake as it was the case here," a spokesperson for Facebook in Russia told RIA Novosti news agency, commenting on the sudden change of heart. The social network did not elaborate on the reasons that prompted the ban of the journalist's account in the first place.

On Thursday, Facebook issued a three-day-long ban against Simonyan while vaguely stating that she allegedly violated "community standards." RT's editor-in-chief said she regretted this decision while essentially accusing the company of spreading US censorship beyond America's national borders. Now, Simonyan has jokingly rejoiced at being reinstated on the social media platform.

In the US, conservative commentator Laura Loomer, who has been banned from several major internet platforms including Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, recently filed a lawsuit against the tech giant, accusing it of conspiring to silence her political views.

While the social media giants are clearly tools of the US government, for some insight into the staff that are moderating Facebook, which also may explain why overall service is so poor, see: Inside the dark world of Facebook's content moderation