Independent Russian media outlets have turned to the platform to post news about the war after the Kremlin throttled access to more mainstream platforms.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the country's president, has regularly updated his 1.3 million followers on the network with emotional messages about efforts to keep Russian forces at bay. Increasingly the go-to social network for far-right extremists and jihadists, Telegram has taken on a Jekyll-and-Hyde persona during the war in Ukraine.
The companies' engineers were expanding that to include people with non-EU phone numbers who were physically located in the bloc. “The process is now completed and all RT channels are blocked,” he said. Vaughn said the ban currently applied to only people who had signed into Telegram with an EU-based phone number. In a statement, Telegram spokesperson Remi Vaughn said the social network had now barred Kremlin-backed media outlets from using its platform within the EU. "We will not rest until everyone – including messenger services - take their responsibility in countering the Kremlin’s war propaganda,” Breton said in a statement to POLITICO.įrance has so far banned RT's French outpost from operating within its borders, but media regulators have been slow to respond to its activities elsewhere.
TELEGRAM SOCIAL MEDIA UPDATE
In a letter seen by POLITICO that was sent to the social network on Friday, Jourová and Thierry Breton, the internal markets Commissioner, urged Telegram to comply with the bloc’s sanctions, and called on the platform to update its terms of service because Telegram may be used "as a means of war propaganda.” Similar pleas were sent to other signatories of the Commission’s voluntary code of conduct for disinformation, including Google and Facebook, as well as to Apple, to remind them to comply with Europe’s sanctions, according to a Commission official. Second, everyone has understood what is at stake by now." "All actors should take their responsibilities. There cannot be any circumvention," said Věra Jourová, the European Commission's vice president for values and transparency, in response to written questions from POLITICO, adding that it was up to member countries to take action against those who had not complied with the sanctions. Telegram removed access to these channels, within the EU, Friday after POLITICO published this article. Similar falsehoods were also routinely shared, both in English and Russian, within official RT Telegram channels with hundreds of thousands of followers. On RT en Español, Kyiv's forces were accused of carrying out atrocities against civilians in the country's two breakaway "republics" of Luhansk and Donetsk. On RT Deutsch, Vladimir Putin's invasion was reframed to falsely claim it was aimed at "denazifying" Ukraine's military. On RT France, the outlet questioned how Europe's economy would survive after imposing sanctions on Russia. Disinformation experts also say Western far-right groups and conspiracy theorists have used Kremlin-backed disinformation to undermine the West's support for Ukraine. Some outlets have garnered double-digit increases in followers since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, based on POLITICO's analysis of these networks. RT's outlets across multiple languages have, collectively, amassed an audience of over a million subscribers via their Telegram channels that are still available across the EU.
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