"Russia is backing a viral video company aimed at American millennials," a CNN headline warned last week. Even though Facebook doesn't usually require users to provide information about parent companies, that's apparently changed, as the social media giant unpublished Maffick's pages on the grounds that it wasn't clear they were partially owned by Ruptly, a subsidiary of RT.
Journalist Rania Khalek, whose work appears on In the Now, one of the pages taken down, tweeted Saturday that Facebook was applying a double standard by not taking down other, similar pages.
But Jim Kavanagh, editor of thepolemicist.net, told Radio Sputnik's Loud and Clear Tuesday that the ownership of In the Now was never kept secret, but rather repeatedly reported upon in the media for several years with little fanfare, and the site's videos clearly show its ownership on the screen as they play.
Khalek has been giving US politicos rising blood pressure a lot lately. Late last month, Twitter exploded when Minnesota progressive Democrat Rep. Ilhan Omar retweeted Khalek's endorsement of her statement against the US' attempted coup d'etat in Venezuela, Sputnik reported.
"Facebook, Twitter, social media have to decide whether they are curated political magazines or whether they are for people to come in and say what they want, say what they feel like," Kavanagh told Sputnik, a news agency that recently suffered a major attack by Facebook last month when the tech giant took down hundreds of pages across Eastern Europe and Central Asia, including those of Sputnik employees, after Facebook claimed they were disingenuously spreading information and posing as locals, Sputnik reported. That move was in part directed by the hawkish Atlantic Council, which is heavily funded by NATO and US defense contractors.
"There was nothing hateful, or in any way, shape or form with what Rania Khalek was doing, there was nothing nasty about it. It was political speech, and they're trying to make it into something else," Kavanagh said.
The journalist said he expected increased pressure now on YouTube to take down In the Now and the other Maffick outlets, noting that "these organizations have to deal with government pressure."