Russian Senator Urges Ban on YouTube As Google Suspends Federation Council Accounts
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – Following Google's decision to permanently suspend the accounts of the Russian Federation Council (Senate), the country's federal telecom watchdog and the prosecutor general's office considered a nationwide ban on YouTube.
"The Youtube accounts of the Federation Council and the Vmeste-RF (Together-Russia) TV channel were blocked, and all information was deleted without any possibility for recovery," the council said on Telegram.
Google's notification read that the accounts had been blocked "in accordance with the rules regarding export restrictions and the application of sanctions," as cited by the council.
The statement added that the council together with the broadcaster had actively developed domestic platforms to make their content available for users regardless of actions by unfriendly countries.
Meanwhile, Chairman of the Russian Federation Council’s (the upper house of parliament) Commission on Information Policy and Interaction with the Media Alexey Pushkov plans to request that the federal telecom watchdog and the Prosecutor General’s Office consider a nationwide ban on YouTube, as the senator himself told TASS.
"I will appeal to Roskomnadzor (the telecom watchdog) and the Russian Prosecutor General's Office that a turnover fine be imposed on Google along with weighing the possibility of banning YouTube in Russia," Pushkov said, adding that a temporary ban was possible as a final warning. "Russia’s 60 government and government-related accounts have already been blocked," the senator stressed.
He excoriated YouTube as an ideologically-fueled information project.
"One of the main goals of their work is to hold their sway over the Russian audience and make the Russian audience dependent on their platform because it has quite a lot of users. They take advantage of this dependence in order to impose their policy on us, which is an unacceptable practice," Pushkov emphasized.
