Litigation by former Russian Railways president's son results in Facebook blocking several journalists and activists

Lawyers representing Andrey Yakunin, the elder son of the former Russian Railways President Vladimir Yakunin, have succeeded in pressuring the British newspaper Ham&High into retracting and even apologizing for a story published on April 21 that claims he owns a house in London worth at least £4.5 million ($6.6 million). Not only did Ham&High retract the story and issue a public apology, but it also appealed to Facebook, demanding that the website remove all copies and posts containing images taken from the newspaper.

As a result, several journalists and activists soon found that Facebook had removed their posts about Ham&High's story. 

The “Kleptocracy Tours” are guided bus tours of London real estate believed to have been purchased with ill-gotten money by elites in Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. The tours are staged for journalists by activists associated with the Russian anti-corruption leader Alexey Navalny. The first tours got underway in February 2016, and several large media outlets reported the story, ignoring a series of letters from the Mishcon de Reya legal firm, claiming to represent Andrey Yakunin and insisting that any publication of allegations made by the Kleptocracy Tours would be treated as harassment and unlawful. Meduza has learned that some of the threatening letters arrived in editors' inboxes even before their reporters had returned to the newsroom from the tour.

Roman Borisovich is one of the activists behind the Kleptocracy Tours. When Ham&High retracted its story, he posted on Facebook screenshots of the article's full text, drawing attention to the incident. Several other activists and journalists shared Borisovich's post. Before long, however, Borisovich's post and all reposts disappeared, and everyone involved received a notification that Facebook had “received a report from a third party that the content infringes their copyright(s).” Soon, these users were temporarily blocked from posting on Facebook entirely, receiving a new warning that continued efforts “to post content that infringes or violates others' rights or otherwise violates the law” could result in a permanent ban. 

Alexey Kovalev, the man behind the propaganda-busting website Noodleremover, is one of the journalists now temporarily banned from Facebook for this reason. He reached out to Ham&High, which told him that it had made no request to block any Facebook users, saying, “If you have been blocked as a Facebook user then that is their decision.” The newspaper offered to help convey to Facebook that it has no wish to block anyone on the site, telling Kovalev that it only wants to protect its copyright.