Why YouTube Has Survived Russia's Social Media Crackdown | Time - 0 views
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In a style part investigative journalism, part polemic, the video’s hosts report that one of President Vladimir Putin’s allies, Russian senator Valentina Matviyenko, owns a multimillion-dollar villa on the Italian seafront. The video contrasts the luxurious lifestyle of Matviyenko and her family with footage of dead Russian soldiers, and with images of Russian artillery hitting civilian apartment buildings in Ukraine. A voiceover calls the war “senseless” and “unimaginable.” A slide at the end urges Russians to head to squares in their cities to protest at specific dates and times. In less than a week, the video racked up more than 4 million views.
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TV news is dominated by the misleading narrative that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is actually a peace-keeping exercise. Despite this, YouTube has largely been spared from the Kremlin’s crackdown on American social media platforms since Russia invaded Ukraine nearly a month ago.
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The app had been a particular venue for activism: Many Russian celebrities spoke out against the invasion of Ukraine in their Instagram stories, and Navalny’s Instagram page posted a statement criticizing the war, and calling on Russians to come out in protest.
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On March 11, YouTube’s parent company Google announced that it would block Russian state-backed media globally, including within Russia. The policy was an expansion of an earlier announcement that these channels would be blocked within the European Union. “Our Community Guidelines prohibit content denying, minimizing or trivializing well-documented violent events, and we remove content about Russia’s invasion in Ukraine that violates this policy,” Google said in a statement. “In line with that, effective immediately, we are also blocking YouTube channels associated with Russian state-funded media, globally.”
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That could leave many millions of Russians cut off from independent news and content shared by opposition activists like Navalny’s team. (It would also effectively delete 75 million YouTube users, or some 4% of the platform’s global total—representing a small but still-significant portion of Google’s overall profits.)
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Today, YouTube remains the most significant way for tens of millions of ordinary Russians to receive largely uncensored information from the outside world.
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Part of the reason for YouTube’s survival amid the crackdown is its popularity, experts say. “YouTube is by far and away the most popular social media platform in Russia,” says Justin Sherman, a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s cyber statecraft initiative. The platform is even more popular than VK, the Russian-owned answer to Facebook.
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Still, Sherman says the situation is volatile, with Russia now more likely than ever before to ban YouTube. For an authoritarian government like Russia’s, “part of the decision to allow a foreign platform in your country is that you get to use it to spread propaganda and disinformation, even if people use it to spread truth and organize against you,” he says. “If you start losing the ability to spread misinformation and propaganda, but people can still use it to spread truth and organize, then all of a sudden, you start wondering why you’re allowing that platform in your country in the first place.” YouTube did not respond to a request for comment.
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On the same day as Navalny’s channel posted the video about Matviyenko, elsewhere on YouTube a very different spectacle was playing out. In a video posted to the channel of the Kremlin-funded media outlet RT, (formerly known as Russia Today,) a commentator dismissed evidence of Russian bombings of Ukrainian cities. She blamed “special forces of NATO countries” for allegedly faking images of bombed-out Ukrainian schools, kindergartens and other buildings.
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“YouTube has, over the years, been a really important place for spreading Russian propaganda,” Donovan said in an interview with TIME days before YouTube banned Russian state-backed media.
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In July 2021, the Russian government passed a law that would require foreign tech companies with more than 500,000 users to open a local office within Russia. (A similar law passed previously in India had been used by the government there to pressure tech companies to take down opposition accounts and posts critical of the government, by threatening employees with arrest.)
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The heightened risk to free expression in Russia Experts say that Russia’s ongoing crackdown on social media platforms heralds a significant shift in the shape of the Russian internet—and a potential end to the era where the Kremlin tolerated largely free expression on YouTube in return for access to a tool that allowed it to spread disinformation far and wide.