YouTube Blocks 500 Pro-Russian Channels at Request of Ukrainian Intelligence

The Secu­ri­ty Ser­vice of Ukraine (SBU), the country’s domes­tic intel­li­gence agency, is report­ing that YouTube has blocked almost 500 pro-Russ­ian chan­nels with an audi­ence of over 15 mil­lion sub­scribers at their request. The SBU also says that 1,529 Telegram chan­nels and bots, 426 Insta­gram accounts, 93 Face­book accounts, and 1,050 Tik­Tok accounts were blocked. Accord­ing to an SBU Telegram post:

June 25, 2022 Sil­ly fakes about “bio­labs” and radio-con­trolled geese, hatred of Ukraini­ans and refined lies for their cit­i­zens  This is exact­ly the for­mu­la used by Russ­ian pro­pa­gan­da, gen­er­at­ing an end­less stream of delu­sion.  How­ev­er, it is not effec­tive in Ukraine. After all, the SBU suc­cess­ful­ly oppos­es the racists not only in bat­tles, but also on the infor­ma­tion front.  The Ser­vice’s cyber spe­cial­ists detain hos­tile agi­ta­tors and agents, neu­tral­ize cyber­at­tacks and expose Russ­ian fakes.  Thus, at the request of the SBU, almost 500 pro-Russ­ian Youtube chan­nels with an audi­ence of more than 15 mil­lion sub­scribers were blocked. 1529 Telegram chan­nels and bots, 426 Insta­gram accounts, 93 Face­book accounts and 1050 Tik­Tok accounts were blocked. And you can also join the infor­ma­tion strug­gle: send to our offi­cial chat­bot ➡️ t.me/Traitor_Search_bot infor­ma­tion about Inter­net agents who “merge” impor­tant infor­ma­tion to the ene­my or dis­trib­ute con­tent on social net­works in sup­port of the invaders.  Remem­ber that infor­ma­tion is also a weapon. We keep the sys­tem and defend Ukraine togeth­er! [Trans­lat­ed with Google Translate]

Read the orig­i­nal post here.

In Octo­ber, the Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tions Report (GIOR) report­ed that YouTube said it had removed more than two mil­lion Russ­ian videos since 2019. More recent­ly, we report­ed that a small net­work of pro-Krem­lin con­tent cre­ators pos­ing as inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ists have seen their audi­ences grow dra­mat­i­cal­ly amid the Ukraine war, iden­ti­fy­ing sev­er­al key accounts, some of which have seen their audi­ence grow ten­fold in recent months.