Author Name: Carribean Channel, Cuba TV.
This story was originally published on canalcaribe.ict.cu. [1]

Media and social networks, a war without milises – Canal Caribe

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Date: 2022-02

Without a doubt, the war between Russia and Ukraine has captured the attention of the international community, including the media and, of course, social networks. It is news this weekend that the META company, specifically its Facebook platform, a few hours ago prohibited Russian state media from publishing ads or monetizing on the aforementioned network anywhere in the world.

This was reported by Nathaniel Gleicher, head of the North American company’s security policy, through a tweet, who also made it clear that Silicon Valley was closely following the development of this confrontation.

Nathaniel Gleicher

@ngleicher

1/ We are now prohibiting Russian state media from running ads or monetizing on our platform anywhere in the world. We also continue to apply labels to additional Russian state media. These changes have already begun rolling out and will continue into the weekend.

10:44 p. m. · 25 feb. 2022

“We now ban Russian state media from running ads or monetizing on our platform anywhere in the world. We also continue to label additional Russian state media. These changes have already begun to roll out and will continue to do so through the weekend.”

The Russian news agency Sputnik reports that on Friday the Russian Federal Service for Supervision of Telecommunications, Information Technologies and Mass Media (Roskomnadzor) accused Facebook of restricting the official accounts of the Zvezda channel, the RIA Novosti agency and the pages , Lenta.ru and Gazeta.ru. The agency described these measures as actions that violate the “fundamental freedoms and rights of the care of the Russian Federation.”

Roskomnadzor in its statement referred to having sent a request to META to lift these sanctions and explain the reason for their imposition. He also explained that the company ignored his demands.

The General Prosecutor’s Office of the Eurasian country in a report released through its Telegram channel states that with this behavior the social network illegally restricted the dissemination of socially significant information due to the imposition of anti-Russian sanctions and, therefore, violated “the right of Russian citizens to freely seek, receive, transmit, produce and disseminate information by any lawful means.

As a result, the correspondents of the Prensa Latina agency in Moscow report, the Russian Federal Service for Supervision of Telecommunications, Information Technologies and the Media of Russia (Roskomnadzor) has partially restricted access to the social network Facebook.

War warned, do not deceive users

To put ourselves in context, let us remember that Russia launched last Thursday, February 24th , a military operation in the Ukrainian autonomous region of Donbass, after the authorities of the Donetsk People’s Republics (DPR) and Lugansk (PRL) requested help to repel the Kiev aggression. Since then, the Eurasian country has been subject to new sanctions and economic, political, commercial, financial, computer and even sports threats.

It is not the first time that there is tension between Russian institutions and Silicon Valley thinking tanks. Roskomnadzor recently reported that, since October 2020, “it has registered 23 cases of this type of censorship of Russian media and Internet resources by Facebook.” The constant harassment and tension with which information about the Kremlin and the Eurasian power in general is treated by the Western media is not news either.

Warning! Nothing, absolutely nothing justifies a war or aggression of any kind between nations. However, once again we must alert the position and interests of the West in the face of this conflict; as well as the new actors of the 21st century, the social network mega-companies which, incidentally, the vast majority of those with the greatest global reach have their headquarters in the United States, the main instigator of this situation.

Another aggravating factor in the conflict that has been brewing for months, without a doubt, has been the role that the media have played in dealing with it, using the old and handy techniques of polarization, manipulation and simplification of the characters to good and bad; and of course, all seasoned with the speech of freedom, sovereignty and democracy that ignores the historical interests of NATO to suffocate and defeat, once and for all, Russia.

For example, in recent days short clips from the tactical combat video game Weapon 3 have gone viral, passing them off as alleged attacks by the Russian army against Ukraine. The Bloomberg website has denied in an article the veracity of these videos from Facebook Gaming, which spread across the Internet like wildfire with breaking news headlines about the alleged attacks.

Likewise, the Sputnik agency denied other material circulating on the Internet belonging to War Thunder, another war video game. In this you can see a shower of missiles in the middle of the night.

Other images out of context that fed the narrative about a posible 3rd World War was that of the tragedy in 2015 in the San Pablito fireworks market, in Tultepec, Mexico, which was consumed by flames.

Alex Pin @alexchaps Start the third world war. President Putin launches military attack on Ukraine. Here images of the first attacks #WWIII

The Spanish network Antena 3 also weaved the reality around the conflict by depicting the alleged start of the Russian invasion with an archive video. The explosion that can be seen occurred in 2015 in Tianjin province, China, when part of the industrial zone where highly toxic gases and chemicals were stored exploded.

On the other hand, Prensa Latina reports that the site of the Russian Space Agency (Roscosmos) is suffering a category 2 cyberattack from abroad, which began on the night of Friday to Saturday, the company reported. Similarly, the hacking group Anonymous publicly declared a cyber war against the Kremlin on Twitter and claimed responsibility for an attack on the Russia Today (RT) television network.

“Our operations target the Russian government. It is inevitable that the private sector will also be affected in all likelihood,” Anonymous added.

The saying goes that both in war and in love all is fair. I imagine that the popular wisdom refers to those involved in the situation, and not necessarily, to the media circus that the West, say NATO and the United States, unfold around the conflicts in Eastern Europe, specifically against Russia.

Last Friday, the vice president of META, Nick Clegg, shared a statement on his social networks informing that, as a result of the events in Ukraine, a Special Operations Center with experts has been activated to stop disinformation and “respond in real time and remove hateful messages or content that incites violence.”

Anyway… The hypocrisy…

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