Russian officials favor the development of a viable “popular alternative” to YouTube, as Moscow moves to restrict media platforms beyond the Kremlin’s control.
“Due to the absence of a direct competitor in Russia, YouTube is still irreplaceable,” Roskomnadzor, the agency responsible for “supervision” of media companies, said this week.
A major state-run energy company hopes to provide an alternative, executives announced as Russian lawmakers moved to empower the central government’s ability to block access to foreign sites. The censorship agency has blamed YouTube for distributing false information about the coronavirus pandemic and other matters, although Western officials see the complaints as emblematic of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attempt to dominate domestic media.
“YouTube is just another page into the whole story about controlling information and media space,” a Baltic official said. “That’s why Putin is still in power — because they control it.”
Russia has a video-sharing platform known as Rutube, but the American original remains one of the five most popular websites in the country, according to independent analysis from SimilarWeb. Its international prominence makes YouTube a key theater for disinformation campaigns, and Russian lawmakers announced they would draft legislation that could lead to the website being blocked in Russia in response to YouTube’s decision to identify state-run Russia media outlets.
“Discriminatory actions against Russian clients of these services have taken place,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in November. “This must be countered.”
Putin took a step toward realizing that threat on Wednesday, when he signed legislation that enables a crackdown on the websites. That law comes into effect on the same day that a subsidiary of state-run energy company Gazprom took control of Rutube. The media subsidiary plans to launch a rival to Chinese-run TikTok as well.
“We have been working on it for a long time, about a year, to modernize it, to make it, in terms of the available tools, not worse than YouTube, and in terms of various monetization mechanisms even better,” Gazprom Media chief executive Alexander Zharov, who took over the company after leaving his post as head of Roskomnadzor, said earlier this month. “Since the video format can be different, either short or long, and TikTok does not have options for long format, the platform is still very attractive.”
The threatened crackdown on YouTube also coincides with other Russian government moves against anti-corruption activist and domestic dissident Alexei Navalny, who often uses his YouTube account to criticize Putin. Roskomnadzor lodged its complaint about “fake” coronavirus information on YouTube one day after Navalny published a video of his apparent conversation with one of the unsuspecting Russian intelligence officers involved in the recent attempt to poison him.
Likewise, the censorship agency’s new call for a “popular alternative” to YouTube “came the same day that Russia’s Investigative Committee launched a criminal case” against Navalny, as U.S.-backed outlet Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty observed.
“When something poses a threat to [the] Kremlin or Putin’s grip on power, [whether] it’s media … or political activists or political opponents … they have to leave the country, or they are killed,” the Baltic official said. “So, in this sense, they are connected: If they pose a risk to Putin’s image or Putin’s grip on power, they have to be taken away.”
