They ran websites posing as independent news entities and created fake personas across many social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Telegram, Odnoklassniki and VK. As of this morning, we’ve made encrypted one-to-one chats available on Instagram for all adults in Ukraine and Russia. We’ll also show notifications at the top of people’s direct message inboxes to let them know they can switch to an encrypted conversation if they want to. End-to-end encrypted chats are already available as an option on Messenger and by default on WhatsApp.
Today, we’re sharing updates that we’re making on Instagram to help keep people in Ukraine and Russia safe and reduce the spread of misinformation. This is a temporary decision taken in extraordinary and unprecedented circumstances.
There is no change at all in our policies on hate speech as far as the Russian people are concerned. We will not tolerate Russophobia or any kind of discrimination, harassment or violence towards Russians on our platform. Lastly, we’re not recommending posts from Russian state-controlled media accounts in Explore and Reels, and we’re making these accounts harder to find in Search. There has www.meta.ua been a lot of coverage and discussion of how we are applying our policies to speech in the context of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. We remain vigilant to emerging trends and stand ready to take additional action to meet the demands of this ongoing conflict. We are taking extensive steps to fight the spread of misinformation on our services and continuing to consult with outside experts.
We are taking additional steps to enforce our Community Standards and Community Guidelines, not only in Ukraine and Russia but also in other countries globally where content may be shared. We are taking extensive steps across our apps to help ensure the safety of our community and support the people who use our services — both in Ukraine and around the world. At their request, we have restricted access to several accounts in Ukraine, including those belonging to some Russian state media organizations. We are also reviewing other government requests to restrict Russian state-controlled media. We have received requests from a number of governments and the European Union to take further steps in relation to Russian state-controlled media. Given the exceptional nature of the current situation, we will be restricting access to RT and Sputnik across the EU at this time.
We already label Facebook Pages and Instagram accounts from Russian state-controlled media outlets so people know where this information comes from. By providing this additional transparency, we aim to give people more context if they want to share direct links to Russian state-controlled media websites or when others see someone’s post that contains a link to one of these sites. We’ve also seen increased targeting of Ukrainian military and public figures by Ghostwriter, a threat actor that has been tracked for some time by the security community. We encourage people in Ukraine and Russia to adopt stronger account security measures — like two-factor authentication — to protect their information in the midst of this invasion. We continue to roll out privacy and security measures to help people in Ukraine and Russia protect their accounts from being targeted.
We have also begun to demote posts that contain links to Russian state-controlled media websites on Facebook. In the days ahead, we will label these links and provide more information to people before they share or click on them to let them know that they lead to Russian state-controlled media websites. These changes are in addition to steps we’ve already taken to make content from accounts run by Russian state-controlled media harder to find on Instagram, and to provide more transparency if people try to share content from these accounts. Despite the Russian government’s announcement that they will be blocking Facebook, we are working to keep our services available to the greatest extent possible.
We notified private accounts in Ukraine and Russia letting them know about this change. As the humanitarian crisis deepens, today we are announcing additional steps to help our community access crucial resources and take action to support people in need. We took down a network run by people in Ukraine and Russia targeting Ukraine for violating our policy against coordinated inauthentic behavior.
We’re also highlighting tools like Your Activity and Download Your Information to accounts in Ukraine and Russia. Your Activity ​​allows people to bulk delete content they’ve posted like photos and videos, as well as their previous likes and comments. Download Your Information allows people to get a copy of their Instagram data.
However, due to the difficulties of operating in Russia at this time, ads targeting people in Russia will be paused, and advertisers within Russia will no longer be able to create or run ads anywhere in the world, including within Russia. This means that people following private accounts based in Ukraine and Russia will no longer be able to see who those accounts are following, or who follows them. We’re also not showing these accounts in other people’s follower or following lists, or in our “mutual follows” feature.