ICA 2023

A Platform Policy Implementation Audit of Actions against Russia’s State-Controlled Media

Sofya Glazunova, Anna Ryzhova, Axel Bruns, Silvia Ximena Montaña-Niño, Arista Beseler, and Ehsan Dehghan

• 30 May 2023 – Paper presented at the ICA 2023 conference, Toronto

Presentation Slides

Abstract

In Russia’s ongoing war on Ukraine, the information influence of Russia on global multimillion audiences is one of the major concerns for Western democracies. Russia’s state news media for international audiences such as RT and Sputnik are the major international mouthpieces of the Kremlin’s foreign politics. With the start of the 2022 invasion, they were recognised as a threat to international security and several major bans were immediately implemented towards these outlets, including a ban of RT and Sputnik in the EU and its member states, their broadcast bans in national constituencies (e.g., Canada, the UK, and Australia), and finally, reinforced content moderation by digital platforms. Digital platforms had to step up as new arbitrators of digital public spheres during the war. We ask how major digital platforms (Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Telegram) have implemented their content moderation policies towards RT and Sputnik accounts during the 2022 war and across ten countries. We perform a policy implementation audit after two months of the war, across six platforms and ten countries (including EU members and non-EU countries) by six coders to observe what content moderation measures these platforms have taken towards 13 branches of RT and Sputnik. Our analysis shows largely inconsistent trends in policy implementation among platforms towards Russia’s state-affiliated media as well as a wide catalogue of measures taken by tech giants in this unprecedented case. We conclude with a discussion of further implications and effectiveness of such measures by platforms for global digital audiences.

Full Article

Sofya Glazunova, Anna Ryzhova, Axel Bruns, Sílvia X. Montaña-Niño, Arista Beseler, and Ehsan Dehghan. "A Platform Policy Implementation Audit of Actions against Russia’s State-Controlled Media." Internet Policy Review 12.2 (2023). DOI: 10.14763/2023.2.1711.