Sanctioned pro-Russian media are still part of Facebook’s advertising revenue program, new research out Friday showed.
Russian state broadcasters, including Rossiya Segodnya — the organization that oversees both RT (formerly Russia Today) and Sputnik — were sanctioned following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and barred from broadcasting inside the EU. Key figures in its operations face personal sanctions and travel bans.
The EU announced the broadcasting ban in March 2022. Meta blocked access to RT and Sputnik for EU Instagram and Facebook users around the same time, labeling it an effort to curb misinformation.
But sanctioned entities remained part of Facebook’s revenue redistribution program, meaning they could potentially share in the platform’s ad revenue, says nonprofit WHAT TO FIX, which focuses on the accountability of internet platforms.
The campaign group said it could not ascertain whether funds were exchanged between Meta and the sanctioned entities as part of the program, but said that its findings “raise important questions regarding Meta’s compliance with EU sanctions.”
A Meta spokesperson responded: “Being listed on our Partner-Publisher list is not itself evidence that an account has received payouts, and any party on that list is still subject to our sanctions controls … When we identify accounts that appear to be run by or on behalf of sanctioned parties, we enforce against them.”
WHAT TO FIX looked at Facebook’s lists of active partner publishers, which include publishers that have signed up for Meta’s monetization programs. Advertisers can choose from these lists where to feature their ads, and the platform may share some of its revenue with these pages.
As of June 20, the lists included as many as 4.65 million accounts.
Facebook removed RT and Sputnik from the list in 2022, but Sputnik pages in EU languages reemerged for one year as of October 2022, the researchers said. A new RT Arabic page also emerged in July 2023 and was on the list until earlier in June but has been removed, according to the researchers.
Le Monde and Süddeutsche Zeitung, who reported on the research Friday, confirmed the findings independently.
Another two sanctioned pages that WHAT TO FIX found on Facebook’s list are related to Russian singer Polina Gagarina, banned from Spotify and YouTube, and Sylvain Afoua, the pro-Russian leader of the Black African Defense League, a group that France banned for being racist.
Facebook’s partner lists also included unverified accounts spreading RT and Sputnik content.
According to the EU’s former top diplomat, Josep Borrell, the media sanctions were designed to target those “who are polluting the public space with disinformation and malicious narratives, adding to the military warfare also through information warfare.”
The bloc’s foreign service in March warned that Kremlin-backed actors continue to try to manipulate and interfere in the politics of EU countries and prospective members like Moldova and Ukraine.
Despite a blanket ban on broadcasters, experts warn that Russia-backed outlets have set up a vast array of accounts, pages and online channels to continue their operations.
Last year, Belgium’s then-Prime Minister Alexander De Croo said the country had discovered cases where members of the European Parliament had been “paid to promote Russian propaganda.”
At the same time, Meta-owned platforms Facebook and Instagram were threatened with potential fines over allegations they had failed to uphold the terms of the Digital Services Act in failing to limit the spread of Russian-backed disinformation.
“This Commission has created means to protect European citizens from targeted disinformation and manipulation by third countries. If we suspect a violation of the rules, we act,” Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said at the time.
Gabriel Gavin contributed to this article.
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