Google pulls Russia Today, Sputnik from Play Store as EU ban looms – TechCrunch

Google has followed Apple’s lead and removed the apps of Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik from its mobile app Store, Play, per Reuters.

The two Kremlin-lined media outlets have been sanctioned in the European Union following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

It’s not immediately clear if the Play Store ban on the Russian state-affiliated media entities’ apps is limited to the EU — where a ban on the two entities is expected to come into force today.

Google had previously banned the RT News app in Ukraine at the request of the government in Kyiv.

We’ve reached out to the company for more details on the Play Store ban and will update this report as we get more.

As we reported earlier, the EU’s legal ban on RT and Sputnik will cover all distribution channels, including online platforms — providing a hard deadline for platform giants to act against RT, Sputnik and their subsidiaries.

Some individual EU Member States have previously banned RT broadcasts in their own territories, such as Germany which banned the German-language version of the Russian state broadcaster earlier this month — but the incoming pan-EU sanction means there will shortly be a far more extensive blanket ban across the region.

Yesterday, ahead of the EU’s sanction coming into force, Google announced blocks on the YouTube channels of RT and Sputnik.

However in that case it is only geoblocking access to their YouTube channels in the EU, where the legal sanction will apply, rather than suspending their accounts globally.

Google has therefore faced some criticism for only implementing a partial block on Russian propaganda.

Google has also appeared a little slower to react to the Ukraine crisis compared to some other platforms.

Yesterday Apple confirmed it will remove the RT and Sputnik News apps from its iOS App Store in all markets outside Russia itself, as it responded to the invasion of Ukraine.

Microsoft, meanwhile, had also already banned RT from its Windows app store and de-ranked both news sources in its search engine Bing — announcing a package of measures Monday.

Other tech firms have also scrambled to put out restrictions on Russian state-affiliated media in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine, with Twitter expanding its labelling policy to flag to tweets which contain links to the media outlets’ content earlier this week, as well as reducing the visibility of the content itself.

Although Twitter has also faced some criticism from European leaders for not blocking the accounts themselves.

In further limited measures announced earlier this week, Facebook said it’s now geoblocking RT and Sputnik in the EU, as did TikTok.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last Thursday, political leaders in Europe and Commission lawmakers have been applying high level pressure to mainstream tech platforms to do more to tackle what the bloc’s president described Sunday as Russia’s “toxic media machine” — trailing what she also couched as “unprecedented” sanctions on RT and Sputnik.

The Commission’s assessment is that the two Kremlin-linked media entities are a key strategic piece of Putin’s war machinery.