Facebook has fallen to almost half its highest price of the past 52 weeks from $384.33 to $200.06. Twitter has fallen to less than half from $73.34 all the way down to $33.39 of its previous 52 week high. The latest drop comes as Russia shuts them both down from the entire country of Russia after both had dropped Russia’s state-run media. It must really suck to be them.
The Guardian reports that Russia has blocked access to Facebook and Twitter as retaliation for those two platforms doing away with Russian news on those two platforms. They have banned Russia Today and Sputnick on not only Twitter and Facebook, but on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok as well. Facebook stock took a steep nosedive when they lost one million subscribers. I wonder how many they lost in Russia. But, in a recent poll, 9% of respondents say they have Facebook.
Now, the Russian state communications regulator, Roskomnadzor, has announced that both Facebook and Twitter will be restricted in Russia. No doubt, both will be singing the blues and accusing Russia of restricting free speech. How ironic is that? Now, they will know what it’s like to be a conservative on their platforms. In the past few years, Facebook has restricted top conservative sites by 93%. This includes sites that paid Facebook hundreds of thousands of dollars for advertising those sites.
As Russia continues its invasion of Ukraine, the country has called on tech giants to take action against the aggressor nation. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen commented on the effect of Russian media, stating: “The state-owned Russia Today and Sputnik, and their subsidiaries, will no longer be able to spread their lies to justify Putin’s war.”
Facebook President of Global Policy Nick Clegg stated that the company had received requests from a “number of governments” as well as the European Union to restrict Russian state media. “Given the exceptional nature of the current situation, we will be restricting access to RT and Sputnik across the EU at this time,” Clegg said.
Breitbart News also previously reported that Twitter claims to have banned over a dozen accounts linked to Russian disinformation operations. A Twitter spokesperson said in a statement: “On Feb. 27, we permanently suspended more than a dozen accounts and blocked sharing of several links in violation of our platform manipulation and spam policy. Our investigation is ongoing; however, our initial findings indicate that the accounts and links originated in Russia and were attempting to disrupt the public conversation around the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.”
