All news

Russian senator highlights need to look into complete ban on YouTube

Google earlier blocked the Federation Council’s YouTube accounts over sanctions on Russia, deleting more than 20,000 videos

MOSCOW, October 18. /TASS/. Chairman of the Russian Federation Council’s (the upper house of parliament) Commission on Information Policy and Interaction with the Media Alexey Pushkov plans to request that the federal telecom watchdog and the Prosecutor General’s Office consider a nationwide ban on YouTube, as the senator himself told TASS.

Google earlier blocked the Federation Council’s YouTube accounts over sanctions on Russia, deleting more than 20,000 videos.

"I will appeal to Roskomnadzor (the telecom watchdog) and the Russian Prosecutor General's Office that a turnover fine be imposed on Google along with weighing the possibility of banning YouTube in Russia," Pushkov said, adding that a temporary ban was possible as a final warning. "Russia’s 60 government and government-related accounts have already been blocked," the senator stressed.

He excoriated YouTube as an ideologically-fueled information project. "One of the main goals of their work is to hold their sway over the Russian audience and make the Russian audience dependent on their platform because it has quite a lot of users. They take advantage of this dependence in order to impose their policy on us, which is an unacceptable practice," Pushkov emphasized.