Russia throttles YouTube, popular with kids, celebrities and dissidents

The throttling of YouTube, widely used for everything including watching cartoons and exposés on government corruption, comes amid fears that Russia will also shut down the Telegram messenger app after its founder, Pavel Durov, was detained by France.

The move comes as Russia is increasingly cracking down on any alternative sources of information, especially online, and has been pushing its citizens away from foreign-based social media apps to locally developed ones over which it has tighter control, such as its video-streaming alternative RuTube.

In early August, Russian users who had grown used to playing cartoons on YouTube to distract their children or having meals with shows playing in the background began reporting that the videos were not loading. By Aug. 3, state media reported that the service stopped playing high-resolution videos in almost all browsers running the desktop version in Russia.

Dmitry Kolezev, a Russian journalist and YouTuber who runs an audience-measuring tool called YouScore, said he had noticed a 30% drop in Russian users on his own channel in August.

“Channels that are pure entertainment and don’t cover politics report an even higher drop than the political ones,” he said. “We suppose that politically active viewers use bypassing tools more actively while other viewers are leaving the platform faster.”

YouTube is incredibly popular in Russia. According to Mediascope, a Russian media market research company, 95 million Russians – roughly 80% of the population – used the platform every month.

It has long been the fourth most visited online platform in the country, after Google, Yandex (Russia’s own search engine) and WhatsApp.

It is also an economic driver and a large market for Russian influencers, celebrities and entertainment production companies, who poured millions into growing their channels. According to NetBlocks, a U.K.-based internet freedom watchdog, one day of YouTube shutdown costs the Russian economy around $23 million.

Internet freedom experts say the platform’s popularity and cultural prominence allowed it to stay afloat much longer than other Western social media that were banned shortly after the war.

It is not clear why the Russian authorities decided to take action against YouTube now, months after the sweeping bans of other social media outlets, but it could be a case of retaliation against owner Google for blocking some Russian channels on YouTube.

The Russian regulator Roskomnadzor and YouTube’s owner, Google, have been locked in a simmering dispute over content, censorship and data storage for years, which flared anew after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Irritated by Google’s refusal to block channels run by independent media and anti-Kremlin activists on YouTube, Russia fined the company $100 million, seized its local assets, forcing it to file for bankruptcy in 2022.

While Google had essentially pulled out of the country, it left Gmail and YouTube functioning, though it removed the advertising and monetization features that many activists relied on for funding.

“YouTube is a place where independent voices and citizen journalists have found a home and an audience. That’s why we’ve worked hard to keep YouTube available in Russia, while also taking a number of actions to deal with disinformation since the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” a spokesperson for YouTube said.

In the months before YouTube speeds in Russia dropped, the platform banned over 3,000 Russian channels linked to pro-invasion propagandists and state-controlled media, according to a recent report by Google’s Threat Analysis Group.

These channels included accounts belonging to Shaman and Polina Gagarina, mainstream Russian pop stars that have strongly supported the war in Ukraine, and the move follows their sanctioning by the European Union a few days earlier.

This drew ire of Russian internet censors, with the state regulator calling on Google CEO Sundar Pichai to restore over 200 YouTube channels belonging to pro-Kremlin media, government agencies and other public figures “who speak out in support of the Russian Federation and the actions of the authorities.”

Some Russian officials have hinted that negotiations with Google had finally fallen through, with lawmaker Alexander Khinshtein, saying in late July that YouTube “will see firsthand that the state has moved from persuasions to concrete steps.”

“I would like to emphasize once again: everything that is happening is a consequence of the anti-Russian policy of the hosting service, which consistently removes the channels of our public figures (bloggers, journalists, artists), whose position differs from the Western point of view,” Khinshtein said in a Telegram post.

Roskomnadzor, however, blamed the slowdown on Google not servicing its equipment, rather than any move on its part.

“It left Russia, choosing the bankruptcy procedure and stopping support for the infrastructure of its caching servers in our communication networks,” the regulator said in a statement to RBC newspaper.

YouTube has countered that the connection problems in Russia are “not as a result of any technical issues on our side or action taken by us.”

The restriction of YouTube risks further limiting independent voices’ outreach to ordinary Russians, especially those who mainly consume entertainment content but occasionally discover political content through recommendation algorithms.

Russian antiwar activists wrote multiple open letters to Google, hoping to see monetization and ad placement reinstated on Kremlin critical channels to help these projects survive.

The Anti-Corruption Foundation, which was founded by now deceased activist Alexei Navalny, reported a nearly 40% drop in revenue after YouTube pulled monetization from its channels. In January, the group sent policy recommendations to American regulators stating that “there is a pressing need to exert pressure on Google, primarily to encourage the resumption of paid advertising within Russia as one of its top priorities, and adopt a transparent algorithmic approach.”

“For many in Russia, YouTube is not just a video-sharing platform; it is a lifeline, supporting livelihoods and providing a vital source of information. Its significance lies in its ability to empower independent voices, offering an alternative to state-controlled media,” the organization’s report said.

Kolezev, who signed of the letters to YouTube, said the company’s decision to maintain its Russian segment has been praised by the country’s dissidents but noted that there has been no outreach to help Russian civil society.

Telecom experts interviewed by The Washington Post said that although Google’s local servers will probably degrade in the future, the current issues with load speeds are linked to Russia’s ever-expanding internet censorship system.

In his early years as ruler, President Vladimir Putin paid little attention to the internet, moving instead against traditional media and bringing it tightly under control.

As Russian authorities methodically banned and weeded out independent news sites, YouTube, alongside Telegram, turned political, giving a platform to journalists and opposition to pierce through Kremlin narratives.

The Russian government was slow to recognize the threat, allowing opposition leaders like Navalny to reach millions of supporters online and coordinate protests throughout the 2010s.

In 2018, Roskomnadzor failed to block Telegram after it refused to give authorities access user data and messages. In 2020, the nominal ban was reversed, allowing the app to function as normal, but Roskomnadzor learned its lesson and set out to implement more sophisticated tools to control the internet.

Roskomnadzor has also pushed through multiple laws to pursue the goal of creating a “sovereign internet” and making Russia independent of the global web and American Big Tech – much the way China and Iran separated themselves from the global internet.

Virtual private networks, an encrypted digital tunnel commonly known as VPNs, were the first to go. Authorities banned most of them last summer, and they have disappeared from the Russia’s Apple Store.

“It shows how the Kremlin influences big tech corporations in order to build censorship in the country,” telecom analyst and digital liberty activist Mikhail Klimarev said.

Klimarev says the country’s watchdog gained this capability recently by procuring special equipment and software that enables the blocking of a distinct set of communication methods used, rather than blocking individual websites.

In 2022, Klimarev and a group of journalists obtained documents showing that this equipment is supplied by Russian companies but assembled from components, including microchips, procured abroad, including from Israel, China and the United States.

Opposition-leaning computing wizards quickly spawned multiple tools for bypassing blocks, from simple open-source VPNs to instructions on how to rewire home routers to escape the regulator’s eye.

“There is an invisible war between the tech community and Roskomnadzor,” he added. “But the latter has many, many resources, and the main thing now is preventing Russia from obtaining equipment that enables the blocks.”

Klimarev projected that Russia will move toward the Iranian model of internet restrictions, where the few authorized websites are placed on the white list, banned addresses are blacklisted, and a significant share of the domains, known as the gray list, face “intentional” disruptions.

“If we trace the (Russian) state’s logic so far, next stop is Iran with YouTube and then Telegram blocked, too,” he said.