YouTube has finally informed us that the video calling on people to take part on January 28 was removed by mistake, and they apologize.
However, this letter is further proof that YouTube is manually tampering with videos of a political nature.
At first, we were told that the problem was “improper hashtags.” Now they are saying that the links in the video description were treated as spam. And that sounds like nonsense. Spam is sending something out without the recipients’ permission. But these were links under our own video.
YouTube is admitting that videos are reviewed by some kind of “team.” It identifies and removes spam. A team, not an algorithm. Well, of course, I could assume that someone on YouTube’s team mistook our video—which had around a million views at the time it was blocked—for spam. But that would be a very far-fetched assumption. There cannot be spam coming from a channel with 1.6 million subscribers whose videos regularly rank at the top.
I don’t know—maybe there are Kremlin spies sitting there. Or maybe Prigozhin has bribed the “team members.” Or maybe there’s some ideologically committed Putin supporter there. But now it is becoming even more obvious that this is malicious intent and manual, politically motivated discrimination.
We ask both YouTube Russia and YouTube internationally to properly clarify everything that is happening, both to us and to the wider public.