RUSSIAN FOREIGN MINISTRY FINALLY REACTED TO CENSORSHIP ON YOUTUBE AND FACEBOOK

Saturday 23 May 2020

RUSSIAN FOREIGN MINISTRY FINALLY REACTED TO CENSORSHIP ON YOUTUBE AND FACEBOOK

On May 20, the Russian Foreign Ministry released an official statement on the censorship of four Russian-language media organizations – “Krim 24” (Crimea 24), “Anna News”, “News Front” and “Riafan” – on YouTube.

The YouTube channels of “Krim 24” (Crimea 24), “Anna News”, “News Front” were blocked on May 19, while the channel of “Riafan” was blocked on April 17.

““Krim 24” TV channel is one of the most popular sources of information on the peninsula. It is a part of Crimea’s largest media holding “Television and Radio Company “Krim” that unites five television channels, three radio stations, an information portal and two Internet sites. The team of “Krim 24” TV channel traditionally covers the most relevant major news topics in this Russian region.

As a result of the deletion of the Krim 24 account on the Youtube platform, about 30 thousand subscribers lost access to videos that had tens of millions of views. The US platform has taken restrictive measures under the clearly far-fetched pretext of “violating hosting rules.”

The fact that Youtube did not provide any convincing facts explaining its actions, as well as the fact that the appeal of the channel’s team still remains unanswered, is unacceptable,” the foreign ministry said in its statement.

The foreign ministry emphasized that it considers “the actions of video hosting as another act of discrimination against Russian-language media resources by US-controlled Internet platforms that systematically resort to arbitrary censorship of content in Russian.”

The Russian side also recalled that in January 2019, Facebook deleted more than 500 pages related to Russia, including materials from the Sputnik news agency.

“These are just some examples of US Internet censorship of Russian information portals,” it said.

SouthFront cannot but express solidarity with the indignation of the Russian Foreign Ministry. Over the past years, SouthFront has repeatedly become a target of informational attacks, censorship and theft of content.

At the same time, SouthFront recalls that our YouTube channel with over 152,000 subscribers, 1,900 uploaded videos and approximately 60 million views was terminated on May 1.

SouthFront immediately made an appeal of this decision on YouTube and sent requests of informational support to various organizations. We also sent emails to the Russian Foreign Ministry and a number of Russian mainstream media organizations. SouthFront emails and requests were expectedly ignored.

The reason is simple. SouthFront has no relations with the Russian government system. Russian official bodies and mainstream media do have no influence on the editorial policy of SouthFront: Analysis & Intelligence. Therefore, they have no motive to provide SouthFront with any kind of support or informational assistance. On top of this, SouthFront critically covers the situation and political tendencies in Russia and has never pushed propaganda in the interests of Russia or any state.

In any case, we are glad to see that Russian media organizations that were censored on YouTube and Facebook got support from Russian official bodies.