YouTube banned Russian media globally but wants Russians to have the same information as the Davos set, its CEO told WEF
YouTube has blocked Russian “state-sponsored media” globally but continues to operate in Russia so people there can access the same “authoritative” information as the attendees of the World Economic Forum in Davos, the CEO of the Google-owned video platform, Susan Wojcicki, said on Tuesday. The conflict in Ukraine showed that information could be used as a weapon, she added.
When the conflict in Ukraine broke out, YouTube “realized this was an incredibly important time for us to get it right, with regard to our responsibility,” Wojcicki said in an interview with Fortune editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell, part of this week’s annual meeting of the globalist forum.
“What we’re really seeing in this conflict is that information does play a key role, that information can be weaponized,” Wojcicki added.
YouTube has made “really tough decisions,” she said, such as shutting down accounts of Russian media not just in the EU – which imposed a controversial ban in early March – but globally. This was done on the basis of the platform’s internal policy, although they had received “lots of requests from various governments” to do so, Wojcicki revealed.
A new policy was enacted regarding “verified violent events,” which puts “denial or trivialization” of the conflict in Ukraine in the same category as denying the Holocaust, according to Wojcicki.
The reason YouTube continues to operate in Russia, she explained, is “that we’re able to deliver independent news into Russia. So the average citizen in Russia can access for free the same information that you can access here from Davos, which we believe it’s really important to be able to help citizens know what’s going on and have perspectives from the outside world.”
Moscow has punished other Silicon Valley platforms for their actions, throttling Twitter for censorship and declaring Meta – the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp – an extremist organization banned in Russia over their hate speech policy. YouTube has so far avoided the same fate.
RT (Russia Today) is a state-owned news organization funded by the Russian government. The information provided by this news source is being included by the Libertarian Hub not as an endorsement of the Russian government, but rather because it is being actively censored by Big Tech, Western governments and the corporate press. During times of conflict it is imperative that we have access to both sides of the story so we can form our own opinions, even if both sides are spewing their own propaganda. The censorship of RT, despite likely being a propaganda outfit for the Russian government, reduces our ability to hear one side of the conflict. For that reason, the Libertarian Hub will temporarily republish the RSS feed from RT. Visit https://rt.com
