Et took YouTube to pull the plug on Russian war propaganda. Although Google’s video platform shut down the Kremlin organs RT (Russia Today) and Sputnik days ago, it is only now that videos from other sources that cheer, downplay, gloss over or pretend to be Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression and annihilation in Ukraine are being blocked Spend “Peace Mission”.
“Our community guidelines prohibit content that denies, downplays or trivializes well-documented violent events,” said a YouTube spokesman for the German Press Agency. Facebook had previously confirmed that it would allow users in Ukraine to swear at the occupiers of their home country. “Death to the Russian invaders” is allowed. Facebook users in Ukraine can wish the same for the dictators Putin and Lukashenko.
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Given the carpet bombing of Ukrainian cities, the use of incendiary and cluster bombs, the shelling of fleeing civilians, could anyone blame them? Facebook rightly doesn’t think so. The guidelines of the network, writes the spokesman for the Facebook parent company Meta, Nick Clegg, on Twitter, served to protect people’s right to freedom of expression – “as an expression of self-defense in response to the military invasion of their country”. If Facebook applied its usual policies “without adjustments,” “we would now remove content by ordinary Ukrainians expressing their opposition and anger at the invading forces.” And that would be “rightly considered unacceptable”. Calls for violence against Russian people, stirring up hatred against Russians – that remains forbidden on Facebook.
Of course, that hasn’t stopped the Russian government from banning Facebook and Instagram, claiming they incite hatred against Russians. One should expect nothing less from Kremlin propaganda. Hatred is fomented on their channels, which use all sorts of tricks to evade the shutdown decided by the EU; here the Ukrainians are demonized as supposed “Nazis”. Russia Today – this is hate speech live. But it shouldn’t be allowed for Internet users in Ukraine to curse the attackers?
In this war that Putin is waging in Ukraine, but by which he means the entire West and free democracy and in which it is not yet known at which border he will stop his tanks, if at all, like so many previous “certainties “ suddenly and finally the mantra of the network companies that they are not responsible for the content that they transport. Putin’s bombs have just made Google and Meta aware of their responsibility.