Meta, the parent company of social networking platforms Facebook and Instagram, has announced that it is changing its rules to allow “violent” posts against Russians who support the war in Ukraine and Russian soldiers involved in the conflict.
Andy Stone, director of communications at Meta, said in a statement on Friday that “due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we are temporarily allowing violent political expressions that normally violate our rules, such as Death to the Russian invaders.”
“We still do not allow certain content against Russian civilians,” Stone stressed.
Meta’s statement comes after a Reuters report cited emails exchanged by content moderators at the social networking giant and claimed that the rule update applied to Armenia, Azerbaijan, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia and Ukraine.
The Washington Post additionally reported that Meta will also allow content calling for the “death” of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The newspaper reported that the American company will also not block content targeting Russians who support the occupation of Ukraine for a while.
This is not the first time that the Meta group “exceptionally” tolerated publications that violate its rules,as back in June 2021, the network had authorized posts from Iranian opposition members calling for the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, for 2 weeks.
Russian authorities have recently announced a ban on the use of many social networking platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.
Since the earliest Russian intervention in Ukraine on February 24, strong international reactions and the imposition of severe, at times unprecedented economic and financial sanctions against Moscow.
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