Russian News Channel RT Banned From Facebook Until After Trump's Inauguration, Editor Claims

Russia's government-funded news service RT was blocked from posting photos, video or shared content on Facebook for nearly 24 hours and was initially prevented from posting until after Trump's inauguration, according to the organization's Twitter page. The ban was implemented after RT allegedly illegally live streamed Wednesday President Barack Obama’s final press conference.

The ban was set to lift Saturday night in Moscow time and Friday afternoon at 2:55 p.m. EST, a few hours after Trump’s inauguration scheduled in Washington, D.C. at noon local time. The organization reported that it appeared a "misplaced live streaming rights strike during their broadcast of President Barack Obama’s final press conference" prompted the ban.

“I’m not surprised. If the Department of State could block oxygen to us, they would do it”, RT’s Editor-In-Chief Margarita Simonyan told RIA Novosti.

RT said they received a Facebook bot notification about the ban after rival Current Time TV filed a complaint over the live stream. But the publisher of Current Time, a Russian-language channel funded by the U.S. State Department, told RT in a statement that “the channel has not sent any complaints regarding RT or any other organizations in connection with the live feed.”

RT, formerly Russia Today, is a Russian international television network funded by the government. Their website claimed that 36 million people watched the channel weekly in Europe. The online site receives over 3 million unique visitors daily.

The organization has been previously accused of participating in Russian propaganda. RT was linked to a "recently declassified U.S. intelligence report" that blamed Russian government for getting involved with swaying the presidential election, the New York Times previously reported.

“Throughout the U.S. presidential campaign, [RT’s content revolving around Hillary Clinton] was consistently negative and focused on her leaked emails and accused her of corruption, poor physical and mental health and ties to Islamic extremism,” the declassified intelligence report said.

RT was also initially accused of hacking and interrupting a C-SPAN online livestream of Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) talking during a hearing in Congress about Securities and Exchange Commission. The broadcast reportedly played 10 minutes of the RT's channel before returning back to the original stream. However, following an investigation, C-SPAN concluded that RT’s signal was “mistakenly routed onto the primary encoder feeding C-Span1’s signal to the internet rather than to an unused backup.”