Between the news that newfound friend Kanye West wasn’t asked to perform at the inauguration and Donald Trump’s plans to take the following weekend off, the president-elect’s first few days as president are shaping up to be an inevitable media firestorm. If you get most of your Trump-related news from the Russian-sponsored RT (Russia Today), however, you’ll see a void until Saturday afternoon. That’s because Facebook suspended the news agency’s official account from posting videos, photos and articles until then.
Per Gizmodo, RT announced the ban late Wednesday night with a slew of screenshots from its Facebook page, which the network’s social media editors noticed was nearly inoperable following Facebook’s decision to suspend it. An official statement from the social media platform said the page “[had] been blocked from posting photos, videos, or shared content,” and that the “temporary” ban would last until Saturday at 10:55 p.m. in Moscow time.
Despite these constraints, the RT Facebook page can still publish text-based posts throughout the suspension. So they posted a statement detailing why they “were blocked while livestreaming Obama’s final press-conference”:
Such things happen because (for ex.) some other news media livestreams carry the same shots and feed, and Facebook considers this a copyright violation.
Apparently, RT live-streamed a feed of President Barack Obama’s final press conference obtained by the Associated Press, to which the station’s social media head Ivor Crotty said, “The live-rights strike seems to be part of an algorithmic failure to acknowledge rights acquired by broadcasters, and we hope it will be resolved in the short term.” What’s more, RT notes that the AP “has not sent any complaints regarding RT or any other organizations in connection with the live feed.”
Whether or not RT’s ban for live-streaming the AP feed is due to “an algorithmic failure” on Facebook’s part, the station’s editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan has already politicized the situation by suggesting the U.S. federal government was involved. “I’m not surprised,” she said. “If the Department of State could block oxygen to us, they would do it.”
(Via Gizmodo)