The Use of YouTube and Other Platforms in Russian Oppositional Activism

The next speaker at AoIR 2018 is Mariëlle Wijermars. She continues our focus on the recent Russian election, and shifts our attention to banned presidential candidate Alexey Navalny and the role of YouTube in his campaign and related political activism.

Russians have used a range of platforms for political activism in recent years, including (in roughly chronological order) LiveJournal, VKontakte, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Telegram; this is also driven in part by the rapid expansion in Internet regulation in the wake of some of the earlier protest movements. Russia enforced a ‘bloggers’ law’ from 2014 to 2017 that required bloggers as official media outlets and imposed restrictions similar to those on mainstream media, for example, and this would have shifted people from blogs like LiveJournal to other social media platforms to which this law would not apply. Further, there are distinctions between Russian-based platforms and international services operating outside of Russian law, of course.

International content genres, for example on YouTube, are also being mirrored and adapted by domestic Russian content creators, of course; this includes politically critical and satirical YouTube channels, for instance. These have come under increasing scrutiny both by users (through flagging and reporting) and by Russian authorities (investigating income flows and content); YouTube has not complied with all take-down requests from Russian authorities, but there is also a greater threat that the platform itself could be banned from the Russian Internet.

Russian political leaders like PM Dimitri Medvedev are themselves active users of some social media platforms like Instagram, however, and their use has come under greater scrutiny; his posts have been used by activists connected with Alexey Navalny to examine his spending on luxury clothes or the geolocation of photos from his recreational travel, for example. The results of such investigations have themselves been disseminated via social media platforms, of course.

Such critical content has been attacked with figures connected to the Putin regime, and this has resulted in the take-down of Navalny’s own Website, as well as requests to Instagram and YouTube to take down related content; Instagram acted on this request, while YouTube asked Navalny himself to remove the content. He refused, and the video remains available – a distinct difference in how the two platforms choose to arrange themselves with Russian authorities.