California, Europe Brief News – Meta Platforms Facebook and Instagram will enable users in some parts of the world to cry out hate speech and violence against Russian forces and Putin over its invasion of Ukraine. The platform officials have made some temporary changes to its hate speech policy.
Meta has also announced that its platforms will temporarily enable some posts that shout for death to Russian President Vladimir Putin or Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.
Meta spokesperson said, “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 Russian Invaders.”
After Understanding what Meta is planning to do to support Ukraine in an ongoing war, Russia’s Embassy in the United States asked Washington to stop the extremist activities of Meta.
Russian Embassy Blame Washington
The Embassy tweeted “ Users of Facebook and Instagram did not give the owners of those platforms the right to determine the criteria of truth and pit nations against each other”.
The temporary policy changes on calls for hate speech and violence to Russian troops apply to Azerbaijan, Estonia, Hungary, Slovakia, Russia, Romania, Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine and Armenia. Meta also sent an internal email to start working on making the changes in its platform policy.
Meta said in the email “ We are issuing spirit of the policy allowance to allow T1 violent speech that would otherwise be removed under the hate speech policy when : (a) targeting Russian troops except for prisoner of war or (b) Targeting Russia where it is clear that context is the Russian invasion of Ukraine”.
The email further said, “ We are doing this because we have observed that in this specific context, ‘Russian Troops” is being used as a proxy for the Russian military. The hate speech policy continues to prohibit attacks on Russians”.
Last week, Russia declared that it is banning Facebook in the country after It restricted access to Russia’s state-controlled media on its platform.
Not only Facebook but several other Social media platforms have restricted access to Russian state-controlled media channels like RT and Sputnik in the region of Europe. This move was taken to stop Russia’s influence of propagating fake news to justify its invasion.
Russia was initially using its state media to shape people’s opinion about its invasion by calling it a special military operation to denazify and demilitarise Ukraine.
