Facebook, the EU and Russia's war: Challenges of moderating authoritarian news

Social networking sites are becoming an increasingly important channel for the transnational transmission of information. However, their role as intermediaries of autocratically controlled information environments reaching audiences outside the autocratic country's borders has not been extensively studied. This study investigates the consequences of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Russia's Russian-language news ecosystem on Facebook, which, as of June 2025, mostly includes state propaganda that targets predominantly an audience outside of Russia. Analysing data from Meta's Crowdtangle API, encompassing 646,230 unique posts from 2,791 public Facebook spaces, it focuses on the distribution of Russia's top 72 Russian-language news domains (critical/uncritical towards the ongoing war) six months before and after the invasion (from 24 August 2021 to 24 August 2022). The results indicate a significant decline in posts containing uncritical news domains post-invasion. Nevertheless, uncritical news domains continue to be disseminated more widely than critical ones, indicating a persistence of Russian state propaganda visibility on Facebook. The study highlights the complexities of platform governance, specifically with regards to the implementation of EU policies on non-EU social networking sites, Facebook's limited efforts to demote Russian state-aligned news and calls for greater attention of regional language contexts in content moderation.