On December 28, 2017, Facebook removed accounts belonging to Ramzan Kadyrov, the strongman leader of the Chechen Republic. Facebook representatives are quoted in multiple outlets confirming that they did so in an effort to follow the law (The New York Times, NPR, as well as Andrew Roth at the Guardian).
This is a disingenuous answer at best.
Facebook, now Meta, is notoriously inconsistent with which sanctioned persons it chooses to deplatform. Jillian York at EFF is on the record with the Guardian in 2018, for instance, noting that Facebook was “picking and choosing compliance”.
Lack of legal oversight and standards on compliance create a question, then, what exactly the line is, in order to be a sanctioned person removed from Meta platforms.
Denis Pushilin, the sanctioned leader of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic, doesn’t seem to cross that line.
Alexander Zaldostanov, the sanctioned leader of the “Night Wolves motorcycle club” militia, doesn’t seem to cross that line.
Maria Koleda, the “Instagram militant”, doesn’t seem to cross that line, even when she outright recruits on Facebook.
Makeyevka and Gorlovka, two cities controlled by pro-Russian Ukrainian separatists, don’t appear to cross that line.
The real-world consequences of lack of compliance with sanctions designations should be emphasized: we are talking about a lot more than just people saying things we don’t like on social media. Sophie Zhang’s disclosures in 2020 revealed the real-life stakes of letting these people stay on-platform: coordinated political manipulation campaigns including in Ukraine, run by the exact kind of people whom the United States sanctions. We see the edges of this, in case studies and rare empirical studies that ‘scrape’ Facebook and Instagram to get data transparency that they don’t offer; Zhang saw this from the perspective of someone inside Facebook.
Preventing complicity in atrocities by American companies like Facebook, now Meta, is literally why sanctions exist.