Facebook parent company Meta said it will not allow users to post calls for Russian President Vladimir Putin's death, multiple media outlets report.
Meta updated its policies after previously saying it would allow Ukrainians to post about fighting and attacking Russia's invading force on Facebook and Instagram, Bloomberg and Reuters reported based on internal emails and an internal company post.
Bloomberg, which viewed internal emails, reported Meta's guidelines now will not allow users to share a post that "calls for the death of a head of state."
Meta last week said it would allow some posts calling for the death of Russian President Vladimir Putin or Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.
On Friday, Meta President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg tweeted a statement saying that a temporary change in its content policy only applied to Ukraine.
However, Russia then opened a criminal case against Meta.
"We are now narrowing the focus to make it explicitly clear in the guidance that it is never to be interpreted as condoning violence against Russians in general," Clegg wrote in a post on the company's internal platform on Sunday that was seen by Reuters.
"We also do not permit calls to assassinate a head of state ... So, in order to remove any ambiguity about our stance, we are further narrowing our guidance to make explicit that we are not allowing calls for the death of a head of state on our platforms."
Clegg, saying the social media platform’s guidance was "under constant review because the context is always evolving," added that there would be no change to policies on hate speech as far as the Russian people are concerned.
"Meta stands against Russophobia. We have no tolerance for calls for genocide, ethnic cleansing, or any kind of discrimination, harassment, or violence towards Russians on our platform," Clegg said, Reuters reported.
Russia's Prosecutor General's Office announced on Friday that it had filed a petition "to recognize Meta Platforms Inc. as an extremist organization and ban its activities on the territory of the Russian Federation," according to the Russian news agency Interfax, the Washington Examiner reported.
The head of the Duma's Committee on Information Policy also announced plans to ban Instagram.
"My opinion is that the work of Instagram in Russia, in this case, should be blocked, like what's happened to Facebook," Alexander Khinshtein told TASS, the Examiner said.
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