Germany Deletes RT Deutsch Youtube Channel, Russia Responds
This move is seen as part of Germany's information war against the state of Russia.
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Germany deletes RT channel on Youtube
The Russian Foreign Ministry described the deletion of RT's German-language YouTube channels as an “act of unprecedented information aggression.”
In a statement, the Ministry said that the deletion came at the insistence of the German side, emphasizing the need for measures against German media in Russia.
The Russian Foreign Ministry considered that such incidents "silence the sources of information that do not fit the media landscape the German officialdom is comfortable with," calling for retaliatory measures that are deemed “not only appropriate, but also necessary.”
The editor-in-chief of RT Margarita Simonyan announced Tuesday that YouTube has removed the two German-speaking RT channels without the possibility of recovering them.
"YouTube has just deleted our two German channels without the possibility of recovering them," Simonyan wrote on her Telegram channel. She further stressed the political nature of the incident, describing it as a real information war declared by the state of Germany against the state of Russia.
With 21 million views, RT De is the fourth most viewed local YouTube channel focused on news in Germany.
Ютюб только что удалил оба наших немецких канала БЕЗ ВОЗМОЖНОСТИ ВОССТАНОВЛЕНИЯ. pic.twitter.com/2knqxnCrMh
— Маргарита Симоньян (@M_Simonyan) September 28, 2021
In parallel, the Federal Service for Supervision of Mass Media called on Google to restore Germany's RT channels on YouTube, after deleting them under pretexts of “violating the COVID-19 misinformation policy.”
