Social media companies may try to ban RT, the Russian state media broadcaster. But the network has proved in the past to be a wily adversary when confronted with efforts to silence it.

Major American social media companies sometimes describe the task of identifying disinformation or other malevolent material pushed online by state actors as an endless game of cat and mouse.

This week several of them made a significant play in that game by booting RT and its related Russian state-owned media network off their platforms, a move that in the short term will sharply reduce the network’s audience numbers, media analysts said. But the Kremlin, when thwarted in the past, has quickly devised new ways to get its message out, they noted, and RT can move to other outlets for distribution.

Take what happened just two years ago, when Canada and the European Union banned RT outright. Viewership in different countries

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