One of the participants at a recent international summit of social media resources Global Voices in Santiago (Chile) said that during the conference, the management of YouTube admitted that the portal is under constant pressure from Russia, which demands to remove videos about Jihad in the Caucasus from YouTube.
YouTub senior official Victoria Grand told the participants of the international conference about the latest scandalous story on this issue. It was about the video statement of the Caucasus Emirate's Emir Dokku Umarov, which was posted on the portal after the sabotage operations in the Moscow subway.
After this statement was seen in 3 days by more than 600 thousand people, YouTube removed it from its server.
Victoria Grand explained what happened in this way.
"It was really a difficult decision and we had a lot of internal debates on this topic. Moreover, it was the material being showed on news channels, so, it had a news value. But Russian authorities took a tough stance on this issue and said that it is almost outside the law", said Grand.
As a result, according to Ms Grand, YouTube decided to remove this particular video material. However, at the same time, she stressed that this does not mean that there are no other versions of this video statement of Dokku Umarov on YouTube.
"You can still find on YouTube a lot of materials of this kind, such as a video from training camp of Taliban, and no one removed this video. Everything always depends on context" Grand summed up.
As conference participants pointed out, there is an impression that YouTube and Moscow reached in this story a kind of status quo. Removing the specific statement of Dokku Umarov, YouTube bent before Moscow.
In their turn, the Russian authorities were satisfied with the symbolic act, though the same statement by Dokku Umarov could still be found on YouTube, but only on other accounts.
It is to be mentioned that the story of the removal of Dokku Umarov's statement is not the only YouTube concession to Russia. The video portal regularly removes videos about the war in the Caucasus. In particular, more than 350 videos clips, posted on YouTube by the Kavkaz Center editorial stuff, has been removed by the portal for the last 3 years.
Department of Monitoring
Kavkaz Center
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