After days of mounting pressure on tech companies to take further action against Russia in the wake of its invasion into Ukraine, Apple today confirmed it will remove the Kremlin-based media outlets Russia Today (RT News) and Sputnik News from the App Store in all markets outside Russia itself. The changes follow other actions taken against these two state-owned media operations both in the EU and globally.
In recent days, Microsoft banned RT from its Windows app store and de-ranked both news sources in its search engine Bing. Google banned the RT News app in Ukraine at the request of the government in Kyiv. Roku bannedRT from its streaming platform. Twitter flagged tweets from the media outlets with warnings and de-ranked their tweets. Facebook restricted access to the sites, making them unavailable in the EU, as did TikTok. And Google also removed them from YouTube.