Tech giants are the EU’s allies on sanctions, but will their efforts work?

A week is a long time in politics, war and the willingness of technology companies to comply with the wishes of the politicians they do not normally wish to be regulated by. Even half a week can be an age.

On Sunday, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen announced that RT, formerly known as Russia Today, and another state-owned news service, Sputnik, would be banned in the EU so they “will no longer be able to spread their lies to justify Putin’s war” in Ukraine. The EU was “developing tools to ban their toxic and harmful disinformation in Europe”, she said.

Those sanctions have since come into legal effect. They mean that both television companies and internet providers whose services are available in the EU are required to ensure RT and Sputnik content is not distributed via their platforms, although it will be up to member states to enforce them and determine the penalties imposed for any violations. Good luck with that.

The likes of Eir – jolted into removing the RT and RT Documentary channels it was bizarrely still carrying on its television service as of Monday morning – are largely immaterial, of course. The EU’s most important ally in this situation is California. The speed with which its tech giants can react to a crisis when it is in their interests to do so – or choose not to react, as the case has tragically proven in the past – is a weapon of war everybody wants on their side.

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Tech steps

One by one, Google owner Alphabet, Facebook owner Meta, Apple and Twitter have now taken steps to block the chief Kremlin-backed propaganda-spreaders, which are said to have an “essential and instrumental” role in aggression against Ukraine.

Indeed, even before the EU’s announcement, Google, Facebook and Microsoft had moved to prevent RT and Sputnik from earning money from advertising on their platforms, while Twitter had actually imposed such a ban in 2017.

On Tuesday, Google cautioned it would “take time for our systems to fully ramp up”, adding that it would continue to “monitor the situation around the clock to take swift action”.

Tech-watchers who have heard similar promises before will be keeping an eye on the effectiveness of this round-the-clock monitoring and what it tells us about the ability of some of the biggest companies in the world to defeat the monster of online disinformation they once helped create.