How Russia is waging war...on me

This is a cautionary tale about the nefarious tendrils of poisonous influence that Russia (and perhaps other state actors) can and do spread to take root in our daily lives and our political landscapes.

Over the last year and a half, I have had an obsession that has transformed itself into my main job, my livelihood. My original YouTube channel, A Tippling Philosopher, was focused on philosophy, humanism, and secular ideals. As the war broke out in Ukraine, I became fascinated by the events and the geopolitical chess game playing out in front of us. I started to make videos on that topic to run alongside my philosophical work, supporting my claims and observations with healthy dollops of philosophy and psychology.

The viewership of these videos quickly far outstripped my philosophy ones, so I created a new channel. Fast-forward over a year, and ATP Geopolitics has grown to over 30,000 subscribers with many community members. I'm incredibly proud of a very strong and loyal following who seem to have taken to my very robust moral and political pro-Ukrainian stance that is wedded to my desire to report things as accurately as possible and not to succumb to my biases.

For a long time, the threads on my videos have been infested with the activity of a fair number of Russian trolls. This was potentially a badge of honor in terms of the impact my channel was having on the information space. Most of the time, you can spot these trolls easily as they all use similar techniques. Sometimes, they weasel themselves in with seemingly pro-Ukrainian introductions that end up smuggling in controversial and pro-Kremlin views.

For more detail on how both patrols and bots work for the Russian hybrid warfare taking place in the information space (often seen as part of 5th-generation warfare), check out my video below:

But recently, Russian influence has moved beyond trying to manipulate the conversation in the threads of my videos.

All YouTube videos that are monetized—meaning they have adverts on them that YouTube places, which generate revenue for both YouTube and the channel—are scraped by YouTube bots that check them for potential infringements of their advertising policies. An advertiser might not want to associate their products with a video that espouses, for example, Holocaust denial.

I had a year of absolutely no issues with advertising until recently, when it started to become more difficult to get all of my videos accepted for advertising revenue. My suspicions were that Russian bad-faith actors had been reporting my channel en masse such that the channel became flagged to YouTube, who gave it extra special attention with their bots.

Over the last week, it has now got to the point where every single one of my videos is restricted. This means that they do not get thrown out by the algorithms to people's feeds so fewer people watch them, and they also get no advertising revenue. When you work up to 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, it gets frustrating when YouTube takes your job away from you at the flick of a switch.

From what I can gather, this is an ongoing challenge for virtually all pro-Ukrainian YouTube channels. It appears that pro-Russian channels can show all sorts of morally dubious footage and still get advertising revenue, but pro-Ukrainian channels are hammered by YouTube restrictions. This may have something to do with mass (but incorrect) reporting of pro-Ukrainian channels by Russian trolls sitting in their troll factories in St. Petersburg or Moscow.

This is particularly galling because I've been exceptionally careful over time not to show anything that is offensive because war is horrible and I don't want to glorify it in any way. That's not what I am about. I am more interested in this cerebral investigation into the politics and tactics, strategies and philosophy of this horrible invasion. Being consistently restricted for inappropriate material makes absolutely no sense to me since, as my viewership will tell you, it's just not what I do.

As it got to the point where every single video was being restricted, I had to do a little fair test. One of the things I did was to read out nursery rhymes for a minute and half on one of my videos and upload the video with absolutely no metadata or thumbnail.

The video was rejected.

Rinse and repeat.

Rejected.

So it wasn't the content that was getting rejected, but it was the (nature of my) channel that was being rejected.

To confirm this, I uploaded videos that were rejected on my ATP Geopolitics channel and uploaded them to my A Tippling Philosopher channel and they were all accepted without fail to my philosophy channel. In other words, it seems to be a channel bias and prejudice that is restricting content.

The ramifications of this are that, given the other channels are suffering from the same situation, pro-Ukrainian voices are being restricted on Google's YouTube. This is a win for the Kremlin. I am now thoroughly disincentivized to and disenchanted with producing content on YouTube.

But it gets worse.

This week, I believe I was one of the first channels to be targeted by spurious copyright infringement violations. I had two videos that were completely removed by YouTube (and thus not receiving views or advertising revenue) because someone made copyright claims against the videos.