YouTube has blocked at least three videos that show viewers how to evade military service after it received a request from the Russian authorities, the investigative news outlet Agentstvo reported Monday.
Russia’s state media watchdog Roskomnadzor notified YouTube between December and February that the three videos violated Russia’s law on information technology and information protection, according to screenshots of the YouTube legal support team’s blocking notices.
The website also notified the human rights watchdog OVD-Info that one of its YouTube channels may be blocked after it recently received a complaint from Roskomnadzor. According to an email YouTube forwarded to OVD-Info on May 6, Roskomnadzor restricted access to its channel “Kak Teper?” (“What Now?”), which it said could be restored if the channel “eliminated” unspecified violations.
“As far as we know, this is the first case in Russia when Roskomnadzor is demanding to block the channel in its entirety rather than a specific video,” OVD-Info spokesman Dmitry Anisimov told Agentstvo.
“We’re now in contact with Google and trying to explain that this demand to block our channel is illegal and represents politically motivated censorship,” he added.
Removing content related to human rights at the request of the Russian government and not because it violates Google’s content policies marks a “new trend,” Agentstvo said, citing an unnamed cybersecurity expert.
YouTube has deleted the channels of many pro-Kremlin media organizations since Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, sparking accusations of censorship from the Kremlin.
Russia has so far stopped short of banning YouTube like it has banned Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and Instagram, along with many independent media outlets.
Before invading Ukraine, Russia threatened to punish Google and other Western tech companies if they failed to delete banned content, including posts supporting the late opposition figure Alexei Navalny.
There’s also a channel called Reporting from Ukraine that I follow which has allegedly been targeted by Russians to get them demonitized. YouTube is not only abetting Russia, they’re actively being victimised as well. Fucking chumps.
Youtube also shadow removes comments that are critical of China as well, and not just in China. It’s difficult to tell exactly what the criteria for removal is or if it’s just fiftycent-army trawling around spamming reports, but it is noticeable. A few years back it was noticed that youtube was “accidentally” removing certain political phrases in Mandarin even on western versions, which shows how thin the barrier between YouTubes “Authoritarian Friendly” version and what the rest of the world sees is.
I noticed that about a year after the brutalization of Hong Kong it has become increasingly difficult to find videos from that time that showed what was happening, videos I specifically remember watching. If you search “Hong Kong protests” now you get a lot of top results blaming protestors for the state violence or equivocating the two etc.
People worry about Russias influence online, and it is a concern, but I think China has a far more sophisticated and far-reaching social engineering mechanisms than Russia. And worse, people really don’t talk about it much despite it being incredibly destructive to democratic discourse.
