Greenwald: Western censorship of Russia is excessive and counterproductive

Governments have been colluding with the mainstream media and social media platforms for some time now in a bid to control the narrative, censoring opposing views on everything from COVID-19 to transgenderism. However, journalist Glenn Greenwald thinks that we should be paying more attention to one very specific type of censorship: Western censorship of Russia.

Speaking to Tucker Carlson, he called attention to the way that the West has been criminalizing the platforming of Russian media outlets. It’s a big departure from the Cold War, when mainstream media outlets such as the New York Times would regularly publish speeches that were given by Soviet leaders like Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev.

He told Carlson: “Now it’s practically criminalized.”

He pointed out how obvious this was when the conflict between Russia and Ukraine first escalated in February of 2022. He said: “One of the very first steps [the EU] took legislatively was to ban the platforming, to criminalize the platforming of Russian media, like RT and Sputnik. They made it a crime, and YouTube immediately pulled it off because they didn’t want their citizens hearing any information from the Russian perspective.”

This is putting us at a disadvantage by preventing us from getting a better idea of their viewpoints, he says.

“I mean, you can hate Russia, you can think Russia’s evil, you can think whatever you want about Russia, but why wouldn’t you want to hear from the other side?” he asked.

Carlson agreed, saying that a speech he heard from Russian President Vladimir Putin in which he announced his military operation was very insightful. He said that most Americans aren’t aware of what Putin is thinking, and he doesn’t understand why people want to remain ignorant.

Greenwald and Carlson concluded that this is due, at least in part, to the fact that “propaganda works.”

Russian state media target of censorship campaigns

The media outlet RT has been described by the U.S. State Department as a major part of the Kremlin’s propaganda and disinformation campaign and was blocked in the European Union and Canada in 2022. However, replicas of its articles appear on numerous other websites, and there has been a concerted effort to try to stop its message from spreading.

German Marshall Fund senior fellow Bret Schafer said: “It was quite evident when we were running the search results in the E.U. that if Russian propaganda is not showing up on Russian domains, it’s getting through, which is sort of a double whammy because it’s not just evading restrictions and bans, it’s doing so on sites that are less transparent than RT itself.”

YouTube blocked global access to all channels that are affiliated with RT and has taken steps to remove what it claims is “harmful misinformation.”

RT acknowledged in a statement that its content doesn’t follow the “U.S. State Department/NATO party line” but is glad to hear its content is reaching different platforms and users.

In September, Facebook owner Meta said that it would be banning RT along with Rossiya Segodnya and other Russian state media outlets from all of its platforms, which include WhatsApp and Instagram, on the grounds that they allegedly used deceptive tactics to conduct influence operations online.

“After careful consideration, we expanded our ongoing enforcement against Russian state media outlets. Rossiya Segodnya, RT and other related entities are now banned from our apps globally for foreign interference activity,” the social media company said in a written statement.

Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said that the world should treat RT’s activities like they would covert intelligence operations.

Sources for this article include:

RT.com

NYTimes.com

Reuters.com