Russia’s state-funded, west-facing media network, RT (also known as Russia Today), was temporarily banned from posting news articles, videos and photos to Facebook, after Facebook claimed it ran a pirated stream of President Obama’s final press conference.
Facebook issued its ban on RT’s materials on Wednesday, after the press conference, and was scheduled to be lifted on Saturday evening, after Donald Trump’s inauguration. But after some commotion, RT’s feed was actually restored Thursday morning.
Disagreement now persists as to why RT was actually banned — with the network’s defenders claiming the timing is all too convenient for so simple an explanation as copyright issues.
“We were blocked while livestreaming Obama’s final press-conference. Such things happen because (for ex.) some other news media livestreams carry the same shots and feed, and Facebook considers this a copyright violation,” the network said in a statement on its Facebook page.
According to the Associated Press, Facebook instituted the ban after Current Time TV issued a cease and desist request to Facebook, claiming that RT had pirated their White House live stream.
Current Time TV told RT that it issued no such demands, and RT says that it was using the Associated Press‘s direct live stream link, and that it had obtained all necessary rights to do so. According to RT, the Associated Press agrees.
RT says it did not receive any official communications from Facebook itself.
Naturally, RT surmises that the US government was involved in cutting off its access to social media audiences, and that Facebook is part of a larger conspiracy. “I’m not surprised. If the Department of State could block oxygen to us, they would do it,” Margarita Simonyan, RT’s Editor-in-Chief claimed in an interview with RT’s television network.
Even if it’s a mistake, RT claims, it was “convenient.” “It might have been a mistake on FB’s part, however those mistakes often happen selectively with Russian users and journalists,” commented Russian journalist Timur Sharif.
While RT has a presence in the United States — its television network is carried by most major cable providers and it has an English-language website — its audience in America is still relatively small.
But it is funded by the Kremlin, and in the wake of allegations that the Russian government tipped the scales to Donald Trump, intelligence sources have claimed it was part of a “disinformation” campaign targeted at American social media users.