The EU has given the go-ahead to take Russia Today and Sputnik off the air. “We will ban the Kremlin’s media machine in the EU. The state-owned Russia Today and Sputnik, and their subsidiaries, will no longer be able to spread their lies to justify Putin’s war,” said Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Council. “We are developing tools to ban their toxic and harmful disinformation in Europe.”
The European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) said it fears the effects of this spiral of censorship on freedom of expression in Europe. “This act of censorship can have a totally counterproductive effect on the citizens who follow the banned media,” EFJ General Secretary Ricardo Gutiérrez said in a statement.
