On Aug. 6, Ukraine’s military became the first foreign army to invade Russia since World War II. While the results of this audacious counterinvasion remain uncertain, it may someday be seen as one of history’s greatest campaigns for a people’s freedom. Oddly enough, many Russians in recent days began their own counteraction for freedom, with possibly a similar effect on ending a war now in its third year.
They have been in open revolt against a government move to shut down one of their few windows to the free world: YouTube.
Since mid-July, Russians have reported major outages of the video streaming service on their home computers. “Russians haven’t taken calmly to this,” reports Meduza, an independent news site run by Russians in nearby Latvia. In big cities, people filed applications – all denied – for street protests. More than 1 million people signed an appeal to reverse the outages.
Even top officials close to the Kremlin complained – about the potential loss of jobs as well as the loss of education videos and entertainment shows, especially for children. An estimated two-thirds of Russians have relied on YouTube for its services.
While most other foreign social media have been banned or restricted since the war began, President Vladimir Putin had been allowing access to YouTube. Partly this was because of its popularity. But in addition, the government has used the site to spread pro-war videos.
Yet as cyber statecraft expert Justin Sherman told Time, “If you start losing the ability to spread misinformation and propaganda, but people can still use it to spread truth and organize, then all of a sudden, you start wondering why you’re allowing that platform in your country in the first place.”
It seems many Russians worry far less about the Ukraine counteroffensive and more about the loss of access to the truth about the war along with many other benefits available on YouTube.
“Live not by lies,” advised Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, one of Russia’s most famous dissidents, a half-century ago. Similar advice from other truth-seeking dissidents helped fell the Soviet Union in 1991. Perhaps the current demand by Russians for the truth easily found on YouTube and similar sites may end Mr. Putin’s war on Ukraine.