Russia recently outright called YouTube a tool of Western “information warfare.”
, a collaboration between Future Tense and the Tech, Law, & Security Program at American University Washington College of Law that examines the ways technology is influencing how we think about speech.YouTube undo restrictions on CSKA, a Russian football club, saying the decision harms everyday Russians. Embedded in that demand was something notable: outright calling YouTube a tool of Western “information warfare.
Many Western commentators think the Kremlin talks of Western information warfare for propaganda purposes, that it is merely engaging in classic Russian what-about-ism. The Kremlin, after all, couldn’t possibly think that Washington controls social media platforms. This is false. Putin genuinely sees American social media platforms as tools of the American state—and Russia’s internet censor saying this explicitly portends an even more aggressive attack on Western tech in the coming weeks.
Western social media platforms’ restrictions on Russian state media “information attack, even information terrorism” from the West. This comment was followed by more disinformation about Putin’s illegal, aggressive, large-scale invasion of Ukraine.Moscow’s recent words draw on a longer history. When democracies watched the Arab Spring, they saw use of micro-blogs and websites to organize protest and lauded the so-called Twitter Revolution.