#Russia has been using the #YouTube complaints mechanism aggressively to remove any inconvenient content, and YouTube seems to be happy complying without much deliberation.

Julia Davis has been long posting excerpts from Russia state TV videos with English-language subtitles. These are intended for internal audience and often very aggressive in tone, calling to eradicate #Ukraine, kill all Ukrainians and generally a stream of genocidal insults against everyone who doesn’t support Russia.

Now YouTube has simply removed 60 of her videos because of… unspecified reasons. This behaviour of YouTube has been long known but the video authors, such as Davis or recently Polish OSW seem to be completely helpless with an attitude that can be summarised as “it was deleted? oh, sorry, nobody is going to view it anymore, that’s how Internet works”.

These videos serve and excellent insight into the thinking of Russian political class, especially by demonstrating the massive gap between what they’re telling to the Western audience, and what they’re telling to the Russian one.

A few people mentioned Peertube, Vimeo etc in the thread, but I have a feeling that this helplessness is learned and reinforced by Google 🤷