RT Has Been Blocked From Posting Content On Facebook Until After Trump’s Inauguration - TruthTheory

By Jess Murray Truth Theory

RT news has been blocked by Facebook from posting anything on their page until after Trump’s inauguration.

According to their Facebook page, where they can now only post plain text but no links, photos, videos or GIFs, the Facebook ban came whilst the team were live-streaming President Obama’s final press conference. They say on their Facebook page, in response to numerous comments asking for the reasons behind the ban, “We 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”. Their Facebook page currently has over 4 million followers.

They were told by a Facebook bot that the current ban will last until Saturday 10:55pm Moscow time (2:55pm EST), and will extend across Donald Trump’s inauguration.

RT have claimed that the ban has come as a response to “a misplaced live streaming rights strike” during their broadcast of President Obama’s final press conference. Ivor Crotty, their head of social media, 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. While Facebook is a powerful distributor of live-streams it is struggling with the rights ramifications. RT will continue text-only posts to Facebook until the issue is resolved.”

On Wednesday, multiple networks live-streamed Obama’s final press conference, but RT News were picked out for suggested copyright violations, as other networks were posting the same content at the same time. During their live streaming of the conference, RT’s live stream was interrupted by a notification from a Facebook bot that claimed that the rights had been claimed by a local Russian publisher.

However, according to RT’s website, for over 12 hours after the block they did not receive any information from Facebook to their admin page to state that this was the reason for the block.

The manager of the ‘news, media and publishing on Facebook’ group responded to a post by RT on the block, which said that “it seemed RT had rights but that the only option was to submit to Facebook’s management system”.

This is the first time that RT has been blocked from posting content to Facebook.