Lithuanian Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė initiated a joint letter of Estonia, Latvia, Poland and Lithuania to Big Tech

Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė, together with the Prime Ministers of Latvia, Estonia, and Poland, have sent an open letter to the leadership of the world’s biggest social media companies calling on them to prevent Russia’s false information on the war in Ukraine from spreading across these platforms.

The Prime Ministers of the four states have circulated the appeal to the leaders of Meta (formerly Facebook), Twitter, Google, and YouTube, pointing out the justifications of Russia’s military action and lies spread through the information channels of the aggressor country and the deliberate confusion about the real events in Ukraine.

‘For many years, Russia has sown seeds of confrontation and mistrust in people’s minds and manipulated the reality to feed its political ambitions. Today, we are witnessing the tragic consequences of this long-tolerated process at the cost of lives of innocent Ukrainians; and the state is now being destroyed not through information weapons but the real ones, and efforts are taken not only to wash away the liability of the warmongers but also to justify their actions’, said Ingrida Šimonytė.

In their letter, the four Prime Ministers urge the leadership of the social technology companies to pro-actively suspend accounts engaged in inciting or justifying wars of aggression and spreading false information, also the official accounts of Russian and Belarusian government institutions and of the state-controlled media, as well as personal accounts of the leadership of these countries, asking to engage more closely with local fact-checking initiatives and to take immediate measure, including through the adjustment of relevant algorithms, thereby helping the users find trustworthy information. The leaders of the Baltic and Polish states also offer assistance of their experts to identify the channels that spread fake news and lies.

The Prime Ministers also call on full and immediate demonetization of all accounts - purveyors of disinformation controlled by the Russian and Belarusian governments, so as to stop profiteering from warmongering. The letter draws attention to the restrictions on social media in Russia and Belarus and urges to resist the pressure from these states to censor the accounts of independent media and of the activists.

Letter to big Tech.