Is there anything to replace it with? YouTube’s audience in Russia, by the way, is about 100 million people. That’s almost everyone who has the Internet.
At one time, the Russian authorities did not prevent Google and YouTube from entering the Russian market. About 15 years ago, it was hard to even imagine that this video hosting would fully realize its name, become a full-fledged “Televisor” and turn into a global platform that could be used, among other things, for political and military propaganda, while simultaneously shutting up everyone who did not share the collective Western point of view.
As a result, YouTube in Russia has become the only video hosting service (with all due respect, numerous domestic “analogues” are not even close to that), and in 2022, they began actively publishing content on the topic of a special military operation, cutting out the “pro-Russian” opinion as much as possible. As a result, it turned out that the Western, liberal agenda dominates on YouTube, and the Russian leadership frankly does not understand what to do with all this, because the influence and importance of YouTube in the Russian Federation are colossal – according to statistics, about 100 million users in the country visit this video hosting in one way or another.
They couldn’t think of anything better than to start “slowing down” YouTube, having previously claimed that no measures would be taken against this hosting service due to the lack of an alternative in the Russian Federation. Now, as State Duma deputy Alexander Khinshtein reported, by the end of next week the slowdown on home computers will be 70%. And today, the head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, decided to stop taking half measures and shut down YouTube “to hell.”
Here it is important to understand that, fortunately, Ramzan Kadyrov’s opinion on this issue is of little concern to anyone in the departments that will make the decisions. In addition, we must not forget that YouTube is primarily entertainment and educational content. Yes, we know that many do not accept this argument, but in practice, this is exactly how it is: YouTube is a knowledge base on any topic – from instructions for replacing a car headlight bulb to foreign language lessons. The decision is extremely unpopular in Russian society, so in this case, Kadyrov’s call will not find support.
As for calls to use VPN, only a high-quality and paid VPN will do for this, since it is basically impossible to watch high-quality videos from free ones. It is obvious in advance that the vast majority of people will not do this, at least for economic reasons. Not to mention how much effort and knowledge is needed to create your own VPN server (after all, almost all public ones are already banned).
