New York:Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri has slammed the blocking of popular photo and video sharing app, Instagram, that Moscow has said will begin Monday amid the ongoing Ukraine-Russia crisis. Mosseri on Friday tweeted, “On Monday, Instagram will be blocked in Russia”. The head said blocking the social networking site will cut Russia from the rest of the world. “This decision will cut 80 million (users) in Russia off from one another, and from the rest of the world as ~80 per cent of people in Russia follow an Instagram account outside their country. This is wrong,” Mosseri said. The decision was made by Russia on Friday after, Instagram and Facebook’s parent company, Meta said that it would temporarily suspend its own rules to allow for violent threats against Russians forces. Meta’s head of global affairs said that the company’s changes on speech in the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will only apply in Ukraine itself and were temporary, BBC said. On Friday, the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office asked media watchdog Roskomnadzor to restrict access to Instagram in Russia as the office claimed “publications that call for violence against Russian citizens, including soldiers, are being shared on Instagram”, according to Sputnik, Moscow’s state-backed media. “In this regard, the Prosecutor General’s Office of Russia sent a request to Roskomnadzor to restrict access to the Instagram social network,” the office said. On Friday, the office also asked a court to recognise Meta Platforms Inc. “as an extremist organisation and ban its activities in Russia”, Sputnik reported. UNI VP ING
