The prime ministers of the three Baltic states and Poland have turned to social media companies over Russia's disinformation amid its ongoing attack on Ukraine, the Lithuanian government has said.
The four prime ministers sent a joint letter to Meta, Twitter, Google, and YouTube, drawing their attention to the justification of Russia’s military actions, the spread of lies and intentional confusion about the real events in Ukraine via the aggressor’s social media channels.
In their joint letter, prime ministers called on the tech giants to proactively suspend accounts engaged in denying, glorifying, or justifying aggression, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
They also asked to remove the official accounts of Russian and Belarusian government institutions, state-controlled media, as well as personal accounts of these countries’ leadership and their close associates that consistently disseminate disinformation about the situation in Ukraine.
The letter also urged the social media companies to partner with local fact-checking initiatives and find volunteers who could help monitor the content, especially in Russian and Ukrainian languages.
The Baltic and Polish leaders also offered their specialists' assistance in identifying channels that spread fake news.
“We urged them to pay attention to that and called for fake news to be removed and the algorithms to be improved accordingly,” Lithuanian Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė said.
In response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Lithuanian news websites also turned off comment sections under current affairs articles to prevent the spread of possible disinformation.
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