YouTube announced this Tuesday, March 1, that the video platform part of the Alphabet conglomerate has blocked access to the Russian channels RT and Sputnik.
The decision affects, for now, all of Europe, but everything indicates that it will be extended to the rest of the world since the previous decisions in this sense of the same platform first began in the Old Continent and then covered more countries further away from the conflict zone.
YouTube thus joins Meta Platforms (Facebook), a company that had taken steps in the same direction on Monday.
In a statement sent by YouTube to the French agency AFPthe video platform said that access to the content of the Russian channels RT and Sputnik were blocked throughout Europe due to “the ongoing war in Ukraine”.
The lock is already active, since the decision was “with immediate effect”, according to AFP. “Our teams are monitoring the situation 24/7 so we can intervene as quickly as possible,” YouTube said in the statement.
A day earlier, Facebook canceled access in European countries to the content of the videos of the Russian networks RT and Sputnik, since they are considered part of the propaganda of Vladimir Putin’s official media.
Alphabet, the parent company of YouTube, had announced last Saturday that it had blocked the possibility of monetizing official Russian media channels with advertising.
This battery of decisions is in line with the ban on these two signals decided over the weekend by the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, who said that the two channels are guilty of spreading “lies to justify the war launched by Putin against Ukraine”.
YouTube does with RT what it did with some Twitter accounts
In tune with these determinations, Twitter, for example, began massively tagging accounts that, according to its algorithm, spread “pro-Russian” information.
Thus, there have been complaints from users (journalists and content generators) who deny being part of the Russian official information networks but were also “marked” by Jack Dorsey’s social network.
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