YouTube blocked Russian channels close to the government almost a year ago. However, RT propaganda documentaries remain accessible on the platform.
“This war was provoked by the West as a whole.” Filled with false information, this speech by Vladimir Putin on the situation in Ukraine comes from a video published by the iEarlGrey channel on November 9, 2022. It is actually a documentary produced by the Russian propaganda media RT , says disinformation specialist NewsGuard in his latest reportpublished this Wednesday and spotted by FranceInfo.
In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, channels close to Russian power saw their broadcasting banned within the European Union. YouTube did the same in March 2022. First by making the accounts of RT France and Sputnik inaccessible, then by blocking the broadcasting of these channels anywhere in the world.
half a million views
Only problem, NewsGuard was able to identify more than 250 cases where documentaries produced by the channel RT were published on the platform. In total, more than 100 YouTube channels relayed these videos on the war in Ukraine. Despite their ban and the false information they hammer, they accumulate more than half a million views.
On a large majority of them, it is possible to find the RTD logo, the documentary branch of RT. However, fifty are discreet by removing all of the dressing of the channel, in order to avoid being spotted by YouTube.
Apart from the iEarlGrey channel, run by a Briton living in Russia, it is mainly small channels that broadcast pro-Russian content on YouTube. Faced with a low audience, the moderation of the platform seems to act less effectively. But NewsGuard assures him: “if they seem insignificant individually, their collective impact is powerful.”
More than 85,000 deleted videos
The organization cites as an example the film “Donbass: I am alive!” produced by RT, which ends by claiming that “NATO is the reincarnation” of Nazi Germany. It was put online by around forty anonymous channels. Removed by YouTube after NewsGuard’s report, these videos had reached tens of thousands of viewers.
“We’ve removed over 9,000 channels and over 85,000 war-related videos for violating our Community Guidelines,” YouTube told NewsGuard.
On Tuesday, February 21, the day before the report was published, the platform had taken down 81 of the 250 videos identified by NewsGuard.
