YouTube has announced that it’s blocking access around the world to channels associated with Russian government-funded media outlets, including Russia Today and Sputnik. That expands the previous blockade on access to the channels that had been put up by YouTube across Europe. Throughout the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, high-profile sources in Russia have minimized the war — after a recent Russian bombing of a maternity hospital in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, the Russian Embassy in the U.K. claimed on Twitter that a photographed victim of the atrocity was simply wearing make-up to suggest wounds and hadn’t actually been there during the attack. (Twitter removed that post.) That sort of rhetoric is what’s been prevailing in Putin’s regime.
YouTube has announced it will immediately block access globally to channels linked with Russian state-funded media. @CNBCnow
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) March 12, 2022
As YouTube explained their latest moves, “Our Community Guidelines prohibit content denying, minimizing or trivializing well-documented violent events. We are now removing content about Russia’s invasion in Ukraine that violates this policy. In line with that, we are also now blocking access to YouTube channels associated with Russian state-funded media globally, expanding from across Europe. This change is effective immediately, and we expect our systems to take time to ramp up.” The company, which announced these steps on Friday, added that they’ve “now removed more than 1,000 channels and over 15,000 videos for violating not only our hate speech policy, but also our policies around misinformation, graphic content and more.”
According to The Guardian, pressure to take action against these Russian sources of lies about the unfolding atrocities in Ukraine came from inside YouTube’s corporate environment. “Workers across Google had been urging YouTube to take additional punitive measures against Russian channels, accusing them of spreading false narratives about the Ukrainian leadership and civilian deaths during the war, according to three employees at the company,” the outlet says. YouTube is far from the only major company to draw down its Russian ties amid the violence in Ukraine — Visa, Mastercard, and American Express have all announced moves to wind down their Russian services, and in a different sector, corporations such as The Walt Disney Company and Sony have apparently begun shutting down their Russian business operations. The White House hailed the decisions by Visa and Mastercard to withdraw from Russian marketplaces; on a March 5 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Biden “welcomed the decision this evening by Visa and Mastercard to suspend service in Russia,” as the White House put it.
CARD DECLINED Hours after President Zelenskyy urged US lawmakers to block the use of American brand credit, Visa and Mastercard, in Russia, both companies announced they are suspending service in Russia.
— Kelly O'Donnell (@KellyO) March 5, 2022
Visa explained its corporate move would mean that “all transactions initiated with Visa cards issued in Russia will no longer work outside the country and any Visa cards issued by financial institutions outside of Russia will no longer work within the Russian Federation.” Mastercard said “cards issued by Russian banks will no longer be supported by the Mastercard network regardless of where they’re used – inside or outside of Russia. And, any Mastercard issued outside of the country will not work at Russian merchants or ATMs.”
⚡️SBU: Intercepted phone calls shows that Russian troops near Kharkiv were ordered to shoot at civilians, including children.
— The Kyiv Independent (@KyivIndependent) March 12, 2022
