Special program ENG

This is a special program from ANNA News. I am Constantine Reztsov, and today we will talk about the fight for the truth.

On 1st of December, the press center of the mass media agency “Russia Today” hosted a round table ’Two-color world: the fight for the truth’. The participants discussed the reactions of the domestic mass media to the fight against them by the Western global platforms.

Anatoly Matviychuk, the editor-in-chief of the ANNA News, and a military observer Akim Apachev also took part in the discussion.

“2020 had a crazy activity on YouTube. Something happened, and something went wrong — thus, they intensified their activities. There is an info-war going on. In fact — it has already begun.

During the year, about 200 Russian channels were shut down, such as «Tsargrad», «Newsfront», the FAN, and others. About a 1000 of Chinese channels were shut down, plus about 50 Iranian channels. The total number of subscribers of the blocked Russian channels on the YouTube is about 10 millions registered users. There is a total of 44 millions of Russian registered users on the YouTube” — Apachev said.

Thus, the YouTube has disabled the access to a quarter of the Russian users from their ability to receive information. “This is a direct censorship — I don’t know how else it can be called” — he concluded.

Konstantin Malofeev, the founder of the «Tsargrad TV» channel, proposed to seriously enhance the state support for the Russian IT companies, in order to compete with the American and Chinese competitors.

“We have to understand that ’Mail.ru’ and ’Yandex’, our two largest companies, are very small in comparison to the American giants that cost trillions of dollars. Thus, in order for them to be able to fight, and to create a video hosting such as YouTube — we must understand that a direct governmental support is needed” — he explained.

The editor-in-chief of the ’Russia Today’, Margarita Simonyan, also noted that China, in terms of the social platforms, has already “went far ahead” in comparison with the West.

“It must be done. It is necessary to involve the state into this matter, and then in a year, maybe two, you and I won’t even remember how we were rightly worried that the informational space and informational sovereignty of our country were lost by us» — she explained

The secretary of the ’’Union of Journalists of Russia’’, Timur Shafir, also supported the idea of creating such platforms. He added that «it is not a matter of a single day.»

Shafir urged to actively promote «the idea that the rights of our mass media are being violated grossly, cynically, and on daily basis» among the international institutions. He called for the use of sanctions and other repressive actions against the Western IT corporations.

Recently, the Russian mass media have faced censorship on the popular platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. After the recent «purge», during which the YouTube channel of our own agency was blocked as well, the Russian Censorship Committee «Roskomnadzor» demanded Google to remove all the restrictions against the Russian mass media.

The ANNA News agency monitors the development of the events in the country and in the world, stay tuned.