Facebook has suspended three video-centric pages run by Maffick Media, a company mostly owned by Ruptly, a subsidiary of the state-run RT (formerly Russia Today) network, CNN reported on Friday.
Facebook has suspended three video-centric pages run by Maffick Media, a company mostly owned by Ruptly, a subsidiary of the state-run RT (formerly Russia Today) network, CNN reported on Friday.
According to CNN’s report, Facebook said it would reach out to the owners of the pages, who it said did not properly disclose where the pages were managed from or their affiliation with the Russian government. (Maffick Media hires contractors in Los Angeles but is registered in Germany, not the U. S.) That Ruptly is a state-owned service is far from a secret, though that Maffick Media is 51 percent owned by it seems to have been kept comparatively quiet.
CNN wrote that Maffick’s chief operating officer, J. Ray Sparks, claimed it was “standard business practice” for the operators of a Facebook page to not acknowledge their ownership:
Facebook also suspended a page belonging to In the Now, another RT-funded operation designed to appeal to younger audiences and that Sparks said Maffick Media was originally created as a holding company for, according to the report.
