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In December 2020, Vladimir Putin held his end-of-year press conference normally. Despite the Covid-19 pandemic still raging in Russia and around the world, the president insisted that everything would be fine. It had set aside 350 billion rubles ($4. 8 billion) “to provide social services to individuals, families, children, doctors and students. “
Two weeks later, some 1,600 kilometers away, the opposition’s Anti-Corruption Foundation uploaded a video to its YouTube channel. In it, Alexei Navalny introduces the world to “Putin’s palace”, which he has called “the largest bribe in the world”. .
For about two hours, Navalny guides viewers through the galas of the sumptuous dacha on the Black Sea coast. A sofa for 2 million rubles, a dressing table for 2 million rubles, a dining table valued at about four million rubles. The omnipresent gold leaf on the walls, a personal theater, a velvet-lined shisha bar, a casino, and even a Dance Dance Revolution room. Building such a lavish mansion would have cost Putin and his oligarchic supporters more than 100 billion rubles ($1 billion) in money stolen from the Russian state, Navalny told the viewer. Money that may have been paid to individuals, families, children, doctors, and students.
The Russian-language video exploded, surpassing anything Navalany and the Foundation had ever produced. Within a few weeks, the film surpassed 100 million views and has since added another 32 million views, a figure close to the population of Russia. himself.
The Foundation’s popularity on the world’s largest video-sharing platform has grown over the past year, especially as Russians have been confined to their homes and the Kremlin has stepped up its crackdown on the independent press.
“Twenty years of rule in general have turned television into a relentless marathon of shameful propaganda, lies and censorship,” as Navalny told his audience in a 2020 video. Behind him, a stack of televisions featured other excerpts from Russian TV presenter Vladimir Soloviev, the ubiquitous face on the Russia1 channel.
In December of the same year, Navalny began his usual video mailings with an unexpected introduction: “Hello, I’m Navalny. I know who wanted to kill me. I know where they live. I know where they work. I know their true intentions. “
Working with the investigative journalism firm Bellingcat, Navalny had posed as a Kremlin official to extract a confession from one of his would-be assassins. The alleged agent recounted how the team of Russian agents applied the Novichok nerve agent to Navalny’s underwear. He recorded everything and posted it on his YouTube channel.
In a follow-up video, Navalny continues to dismantle the failed murder plot in front of a wall with photographs of the men, maps of the operation and a red thread connecting it all.
In the West, Navalny’s appeal has been reduced to that of a mere opposition figure: a divisive figure, for some, who has become Putin’s de facto choice after other options have been killed or jailed.
But in the years leading up to his imprisonment in 2021 and his death in February 2024, Navalny was much more than just a politician, and the media apparatus of which he was larger than himself.
While Russia has become much more autocratic in recent years, with even stricter elections and media increasingly controlled through the Kremlin, YouTube remains one of the few U. S. -based social media sites that still exist in the country and a reliable and effective network. a channel for the Russian public. This may be key to determining what will happen next in Moscow: whether YouTubers will be able to stay ahead of Kremlin censorship.
“With minimal resources we were able to identify a direct competitor to Putin’s propaganda television,” says Vladimir Milov. “We’re still them, but we’re breathing them in. “
Milov is a former deputy minister in the Russian government, a former associate of Navalny’s and a YouTube author in his own right. I met him in Vilnius, where he has been in exile since Moscow launched criminal proceedings against him. Milov was found guilty by Russian courts of distributing “war forgeries” and sentenced to 8 years of crime in absentia.
Milov’s regular updates, which tend to concentrate on economics and finance, are aimed at his more than 500,000 followers and garner about a million views. Leonid Volkov, another of Navalny’s affiliates who helps run the Anti-Corruption Foundation, has a large number of fans. Dasha Navalnaya, Alexei Navalny’s daughter, has her own channel where she interviews Russian Gen Z about the state of their country.
In addition, independent media outlets have also discovered a second home on YouTube. Meduza, an independent media outlet that had to take refuge in Latvia after being declared a “foreign agent” under Russian law, has only about 800,000 subscribers. The BBC’s Russian service, which left the country amid a media crackdown in 2022, broadcasts to its 2. 5 million subscribers.
Combining research from those other channels, Milov claims that opposition YouTubers have between 10 and 15 million engaged audiences in Russia, while another 20 million viewers are likely to stumble upon their content from time to time.
“Our message is to reach the Russian people,” Milov says. “We are a very effective election dissemination tool, which competes with Putin’s propaganda. “
VCIOM, a poll close to the Kremlin, found that most Russians still prefer to be informed about heavily censored Russian television, but their acceptance of the format has plummeted from about 50 percent in 2016 to just 25 percent today. At the same time, acceptance as true in online news is greater and to about the same extent.
Meanwhile, as Western programming becomes scarce, many Russians are turning to YouTube as their primary source of entertainment, especially for children’s programming. According to the ranking compiled through the research company Socialblade, 8 of the ten Russian YouTube channels with the highest number of subscribers are aimed at young children.
As a result, Russians are wasting religion on state-approved TV news, relying on online media, and turning to YouTube for entertainment. It has expelled tens of millions of other people from the opposition.
While most Russian YouTube users are looking for content that will put their kids at ease, bringing them to the platform has huge benefits, Milov says. “There’s a magic black box called YouTube recommendations. “He says that many of his fans don’t even watch his videos, they pay attention to him. If Russians let the ruleset decide their next video while they cook dinner or fold laundry, they increase the chances that their voice will succeed in a Russian who has never heard it before.
Milov points out that YouTube is not just a one-way service: since it allows users to comment and speak anonymously, it gives Russians an additional opportunity to express themselves without fear of censorship.
“The amount of our comments is enormous,” he says. Only I, alone, literally receive messages, every day, from at least many other people across the country. When does something bad happen? Thousands. ” Sometimes, Milov says, the first indication that something terrible has happened in Russia is seeing the number of unread messages he has in his YouTube inbox.
Milov believes these reactions reflect the idea, supported even by Kremlin-approved pollsters, that opposition to the war in Ukraine is growing. But it also brings some vital points and nuances. ” So it’s like, I would say, a massive group discussion, which you can talk to as well. You can ask them questions. He laughs at Russia’s infamous security and intelligence agency: “You know, the FSB would kill for this kind of information. “
“Obviously, the question is: why didn’t Putin shut down YouTube?he said Milov. Es easier said than done. “
In recent years, Moscow has deployed a variety of methods to intimidate and kill independent and open media in Russia. Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and TikTok have been absolutely blocked. Independent media outlets such as Meduza, TV Rain, and The Insider have been blocked. declared “undesirable” or labeled as “foreign agents. “
Despite all this, YouTube survived.
Milov claims that the Kremlin has taken too long to act on YouTube. By the time Moscow banned other popular Western platforms, the Google-owned video platform had become indispensable to Russians. “They somehow let the genie out of the bottle,” Milov says.
“YouTube is mothers who show cartoons to their children, teenagers who watch music videos, other people who watch comedians, older people who watch old Soviet movies, what can be seen there, etc. , she says. And you stopped everything? So you have them empty. afternoons now, from now on.
Unable to disrupt YouTube, the Kremlin has desperately tried to compete with it.
Moscow had high hopes for Rutube, a long-suffering YouTube clone that was revived in 2020 after a merger with the media arm of state-controlled energy giant Gazprom. According to the site’s “best videos” segment, it didn’t work: some had accumulated a number of perspectives on the order of several thousand.
VK, Russia’s answer to Facebook, is doing better with its video-sharing platform and is packed with pro-Kremlin broadcasters. But even its most popular channels have only a small fraction of the largest Russian-language YouTube accounts.
“It’s like a big hall, but it’s empty,” Milov says of those Kremlin-backed alternatives.
Unable to compete with his critics online, Milov believes Putin has opted for a more direct strategy. A few days before my arrival in Vilnius, thugs gave the impression of being outdoors in the home of Leonid Volkov, former chairman of the Anti-Corruption Committee. Armed with hammers, they beat him savagely. Lithuanian intelligence services believe that the detainees were acting on orders from Russia. A week after the attack, Volkov returned to YouTube with his arm in a sling: “I’m not going to stop, I’ll gesticulate less in the coming weeks. “,” he said.
Milov emailed me the day I arrived to apologize because, due to his new security protocols, he wouldn’t be able to show me in his home broadcast studio.
Last November, the YouTube channel Volgograd Watch uploaded a new video to answer a trick question: “When will the mobilized return?
The channel’s subscribers wondered when Russian conscripts on the front line would be able to return home. Evgeny Kochegin, the channel’s host, responded by offering a litany of links recommending pacifist teams and resources on how to avoid conscription. Kochegin himself fled from conscription and was convicted in absentia for spreading “fake news. “
In exile, Kochegin tried to help others avoid being forced into military service and turned to YouTube to do so, amassing a modest 30,000 subscribers. However, in May, Kochegin deemed YouTube not to be a reliable partner. His video was blocked for Russian viewers.
Agents Media, an independent Russian media outlet, reviewed four other takedown notices targeting YouTube channels committed to human rights and war. The news outlet received emails from YouTube’s legal team, threatening to take an entire channel offline. In the email to OVD-Info channel, YouTube wrote that the channel had violated Russian law No. 149-FZ and that “if you do not remove the content, Google may have to block it. “
According to a transparency report by the company, Google has obtained thousands of removal requests from the Russian government since 2022, totaling only about 67,000 for “national security” reasons, more than two hundred for “criticism of the government” and one for violating election law.
More than 1,000 requests from Moscow in particular cited Law No. 149-FZ, which called for the removal of approximately one million pieces of content, which can only include channels, videos or comments. Google reports that it has approved more than 80% of those removal requests.
An open letter published in May, signed by leading Russian NGOs and Reporters Without Borders, called on Google not to accede to Moscow’s requests. “We are very concerned that the company appears to be helping Russian censorship silence human rights and peace voices. ,” they wrote.
In a statement, a YouTube spokesperson insisted that if the company implied that legal requests would be used to silence dissent, “we will respond,” noting that Russian courts have fined Google in the future for refusing to comply with their orders.
YouTube says it has gotten rid of more than 12,000 channels and more than 140,000 videos similar to the war in Ukraine for violating the platform’s policies, adding pro-Putin propagandists, Kremlin-controlled media and Russian Foreign Ministry content.
YouTube’s spokesperson, however, ignored questions about why it was so willing to respond to requests under Act No. 149-FX.
Whether their chains are threatened by Moscow’s legal demands or Moscow blocks them entirely, Russian dissidents are drawing up contingency plans. “They will not kill us simply with one final thing and forcing the other to cooperate with the regime,” Milov says. “We’re going to sail through it. “
One of the plans is to finish where the challenge began: on television.
Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, an organization calling itself the Denis Diderot Committee began calling on major satellite TV providers to prevent the transmission of Kremlin propaganda to Russia and Europe and update it with genuine information.
“That’s the ultimate goal of our efforts: to truly offer select media channels in the Russian television area controlled through the Russian government,” Jim Phillipoff, one of the committee members, told WIRED at the time.
Two years later, the committee won a major victory. Satellite provider Eutelsat accepted the committee’s challenge and signed an agreement with Reporters Without Borders to broadcast 11 independent Russian news and content channels in the region, with the option to add 14 more. Call it a Svoboda satellite package, the Russian word for “freedom. “
Phillipoff told WIRED this week that they have transmitted to 4. 5 million households in Russia and another 61 million homes in the region as a whole, and they hope to increase that number by getting area on other regional satellites.
While the satellite only rebroadcasts a few existing channels, Philipoff says it also created some channels from scratch, in some cases made up of YouTube content from Russian dissidents. They are in talks with Volkov to help him broadcast some of the Anti-Corruption Program’s paintings. Foundation and other opposition groups. (They also discussed how to cooperate with eQsat, a similar task for disseminating satellites of virtual news archives, revealed through WIRED last September. )
While Russian TV remains under the control of the Kremlin and Google remains willing to block content at its request, Svoboda exists to reject censorship altogether, Phillipoff says.
“The goal of our mission is to circumvent this control. “
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