Has Big Tech finally picked a side in Russia’s war on Ukraine?

Yesterday morning, as Muscovites flowed into Metro stations across the city at rush hour, some appeared to find themselves stopped at the turnstiles. Queues formed; financial sanctions meant that the customers of many Russian banks could no longer use Google and Apple Pay, and some could no longer get through the barriers.

This was not the only thing they’d have noticed when they woke up. Facebook, used by some 70 million Russians, was loading very slowly, or not at all. And anyone hoping to purchase a new iPhone would find themselves disappointed: Apple had suspended sales in the country.

Over the past week, as the invasion has intensified and Putin has rained terror on Kyiv, Big Tech has made moves to take on the Russian state. Elon Musk led the charge: on Saturday, 10 hours after Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s minister for digital transformation, pleaded with Musk to send support, Musk responded on Twitter to say that Starlink — a satellite internet system run by Musk’s company, SpaceX — had sent systems to Ukraine.

Wars are not just won with tanks, but by those who control the flow of information and can command the loyalty of vast audiences. For the first time in history, those who control that information are private companies. “Big tech operates the platforms [Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok] through which billions of people are experiencing the Russian invasion of Ukraine,” says Emerson T Brooking, resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.

With a direct line to the hearts and minds of billions worldwide, many observe Big Tech’s influence supersedes that of nation states. They are the gatekeepers of the world’s information. And their responsibility in the crisis is twofold, argues Brooking. “Firstly, they have an immediate responsibility for the safety and security of their users in harm’s way. And they have a broader responsibility to remove disinformation and war propaganda that may be used to enable violence.”

Russia is in the business of misinformation. “Russia’s approach comes from the old KGB strategies, where they’d try to mix reality with their propaganda messages to convert people [from other nations to their way of thinking],” explains Claudia Flores-Saviaga, a former Facebook fellow who studies misinformation at Northeastern University.

Disinformation experts have pointed out that efforts on the part of Russian command and various state-sponsored actors had been ramped up in the two weeks leading up to the invasion, presenting their countrywide invasion of Ukraine as a “special military operation” to “denazify” the Donbas region.

Silicon Valley giants have always been careful to maintain neutrality in affairs of state. But this crisis has given rise to such widespread and egregious dissemination of Russian-backed disinformation that last week, heads of state, including the prime ministers of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, called on the likes of Meta, Twitter and Google to act. Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, detailed EU plans to “ban... the Kremlin’s media machine” from operating within the EU due “their toxic and harmful [spreading of] disinformation”.

Silicon Valley heeded the call. On Sunday, Meta published a blogpost written by its head of security policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, which explained how Meta had dismantled “a network of about 40 accounts, Pages and Groups on Facebook and Instagram... operated from Russia and Ukraine and targeted people in Ukraine across multiple social media platforms and through their own websites... We detected attempts to target people on Facebook to post YouTube videos portraying Ukrainian troops as weak and surrendering to Russia, including one video claiming to show Ukrainian soldiers coming out of a forest while flying a white flag of surrender”.

Meta also announced that it had begun preventing Russian state media from running adverts on its platforms, the implications of which could be huge: Facebook is the most powerful social media platform, with around 2.9 billion people logging on every day worldwide. Twitter has started adding labels to tweets that shared links to Russian state-affiliated media websites which flag to users that they might be consuming biased information.