The Russia Today channel was already threatened by audiovisual regulators, in France via Arcom and in the United Kingdom via Ofcom. The European Union will ban the Russian state channel, as well as the Russian media Sputnik. This is the meaning of the speech given on Sunday afternoon by the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen. “We will ban the Kremlin’s media machine in the European Union: state media Russia Today and Sputnik and their affiliates will no longer be allowed to spread their lies to justify Putin’s war and sow division within of the Union,” she explained.
“A violation of the rule of law”, according to RT France
“We will therefore develop tools to ban this toxic disinformation and keep it away from Europe,” said the President of the European Commission. The Russia Today channel is broadcast today in about a hundred countries. It has with the site of the Sputnik press agency an annual budget of 430 million euros entirely financed by Russia.
Director of RT France Xenia Fedorova reacted on Twitter claiming that this decision was “a violation of the rule of law which goes against the very principles of freedom of expression”. For the moment, no details have been provided on the date or the way of banning this channel from the European audiovisual landscape.
Russian news agency Tas also in the hot seat
The European Union is not alone in taking restrictive measures on disinformation by Russia. Earlier on Sunday, Google announced that it had suspended the ability of Russian state-funded media to generate money on its various platforms. Before Google, YouTube and Facebook had taken similar action in response to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
The European Alliance of News Agencies has decided to suspend the Russian agency Tass. On Sunday, EANA demanded the immediate suspension of this Russian agency, which is somewhat the equivalent of AFP in France. This decision comes following the new regulations applied by the Russian government which strongly restrict the freedom of the media. EANA has existed since 2018 and its role is to promote the general information press. In Europe, it represents nearly 300 news titles.
This decision taken unanimously by the board of directors to ban the Russian agency Tass follows the takeover of the Russian media by the authorities. On Saturday, the Russian media regulator ordered national media to remove any reference to civilians killed by the Russian military in Ukraine as well as the terms “declaration of war”, “invasion” or “offensive”.