YouTube banned? Russia goes to war with Google!
In 2021, wars are still being fought with losses and din in many countries far from our own and man does not seem really determined to stop hitting each other as he has done for millennia. Yet in the age of the Internet king, another kind of conflict emerges and takes a little more magnitude day by day: the information war ! When you can reach millions of people around the world in a second, why not. Especially when you can share anything and everything, but especially anything.
The problem today is to know how to judge where the nonsense begins, with sometimes cataclysmic consequences for certain media, as witnessed by Russia Today.
Red card !
When Donald Trump announces that drinking bleach cures COVID, we don’t really need an analysis by 125 scientists to quickly understand that this information is false and dangerous if it spreads. But as the epidemic continues almost two years after its onset, the topic is still making the headlines. A few days ago, the German branch of Russia Today saw himself suspended from Youtube for one week for sharing a video deemed to be in violation of the Disease Disease Disease Policy. The Russian state media then attempted a pirouette by continuing to share its work on a second account. Unmasked, he was given a red card and his German account was banned and deleted from the video platform.
YouTube’s removal of RT’s German-language channels prompted outright hysteria by Russia’s state TV and gov’t officials.
RT’s editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan explained her anguish: “In modern wars, YouTube is a weapon. It is much more effective than any other weapons.” pic.twitter.com/dPlAsNgsIg
– Julia Davis (@JuliaDavisNews) September 29, 2021
An eye for an eye…
The reactions were not long in coming from the Russian side. Roskomnadzor, the umbrella agency for mass media, sum Google to lift the restrictions, even going so far as to threaten the American company to block access to Youtube in the country of Sharapova if nothing was done in this direction. Going even further in the invective, Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of Russia Today, pointed the finger at the German government which would be, according to her, responsible for this banishment. ” This is a real media war declared by the German state against the Russian state. »She declared on Twitter. For the sake of fairness in the severity of the measures, Simonyan therefore asked the competent authorities of his country to in turn ban the German media in Russia. And his voice seems to have been heard if we refer to a statement from Sergey Lavrov, the foreign minister:
Given the nature of the incident, which is fully in line with the logic of the information war unleashed against Russia, taking symmetrical retaliatory measures against the German media in Russia would seem not only appropriate, but also necessary. .
It should be noted that, for its part, the German government denies altogether having had any influence whatsoever on the decision taken by Youtube to ban the account of Russia Today.
If we can understand that it is important to regulate even a little the information shared in mass on social networks and on video services such as Youtube, the lack of transparency regarding ” Those who decide the truth Is problematic. Knowing that bans can happen in the blink of an eye and therefore, at times, seem like some sort of censorship rather than regulation. Here lies the real debate about these incredibly influential companies capable of bringing down empires with just one click. ” Who watches over those who watch ? Alan Moore asked the question in the graphic novel Watchmen 35 years ago.
The time has come to answer them.
