Russian President Vladimir Putin is putting his information crackdown into a new gear.
Russia’s telecommunications regulator, Roskomnadzor, said Friday that it plans to cut the country off from Facebook.
The move amounts to a major escalation in the Kremlin’s efforts to freeze its citizens’ access to independent reporting on Russia’s bloody invasion of neighboring Ukraine.
In a statement, Roskomnadzor portrayed its block on Facebook as a move to improve media freedom and cited 26 cases of “discrimination” against Russian news outlets since October 2020.
Last week, the Kremlin said it was partially restricting Facebook access in Russia, accusing the social media giant of illegally censoring Russian media.
Meta, Facebook’s parent company, said at the time that Russian authorities had ordered it to stop fact-checking content from four news outlets, all government mouthpieces. Meta said it had declined.
On Friday, Nick Clegg, the president of global affairs at Meta, said the social media giant intends to push to restore access in Russia.
“Soon millions of ordinary Russians will find themselves cut off from reliable information, deprived of their everyday ways of connecting with family and friends and silenced from speaking out,” Clegg said in a statement.
“We will continue to do everything we can to restore our services so they remain available to people to safely and securely express themselves and organize for action,” Clegg added in the statement.
The Kremlin has aggressively curtailed press freedoms since last week, when it launched a vicious assault on Ukraine, a nation of 42 million people that sits in the former Soviet Union.
The BBC said Friday that it was pausing its reporting from inside Russia in response to a freshly passed law that seems to criminalize independent news gathering in the country.
Tim Davie, the director-general of the BBC, said the broadcaster was concerned about the safety of its reporters, but would continue to cover Russia from beyond the borders of the country.
Putin has weaved together a falsehood-filled rationale for his war, which has met protests in Moscow and other Russian cities.
The West, horrified and united by the invasion, has slammed the Russian economy with sanctions. Ukrainians, meanwhile, have fought hard against the invaders, stalling their push outside the capital of Kyiv.
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