Following the Facebook ban, Russia has now announced that it will also ban Instagram in the country. the edge informed. Russia’s communication agency said the move was taken in response to Meta’s decision to allow calls for “violence against Russian citizens on its Facebook and Instagram social networks.”
Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, tweeted: “This decision will separate 80 million in Russia from each other and from the rest of the world, as 80% of people in Russia follow an Instagram account outside of their country. This is bad.”
Giving active users time to manage their content, transfer it to other social media platforms and inform their contacts, the agency has announced that Instagram will be removed on March 14.
Although the Russian oligarchs themselves are on these social networks, the Russian government does not mention that in its notice. For example, Sofia Abramovich, the daughter of billionaire Roman Abramovich, said that “the biggest and most successful lie in the Kremlin’s propaganda is that most Russians are with Putin.”
Meta’s chairman of global affairs, Nick Clegg, believes in providing netizens with the right to freedom of expression, but with this move by the Russian government, that might not be possible.