YouTube has grown to be the most popular website on the Russian Internet, but the Kremlin wants to take steps to limit its influence. Government critics are using the platform to voice their political opinions and can reach audiences on a scale similar to government-controlled TV stations. Yet the question remains: Will the authorities actually be able to hold back this online wave of opinion? The final episode of Andrey Loshаk’s InterNYET series looks at the YouTube phenomenon in Russia.
The Ukraine crisis coincided with a Russian crackdown on independent online media. New laws since then have brought new restrictions, and the Internet adviser to President Vladimir Putin tells Current Time that China is the model for further online regulation. This story is part of a documentary series, InterNYET, by Current Time that explores the history of the Russian web.
Their impact stretches beyond the 2016 U.S. presidential election that made them an international household name. Russian trolls, says blogger Ilya Varlamov, have changed “the whole picture” for online news in Russia. But how did they do it? In this video, taken from Current Time’s InterNYET: A History Of The Russian Internet series, former employees at a St. Petersburg troll factory get down to specifics.
LiveJournal was founded in Seattle, but became the go-to platform for Russian activists. Then the Kremlin hit back, heralding a wider crackdown on Internet freedom. This story is part of Current Time's documentary series InterNYET: A History Of The Russian Internet.
2019 marked the 50th anniversary of the day U.S. astronauts Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Mike Collins became the first people to land on the moon. Anna Shamanska explains why the real story of July 20, 1969 is much more interesting than any conspiracy theory.
Russia bucked global trends with two homegrown social media that are more popular there than Facebook. Both were backed by the same Israeli-Russian billionaire tech investor. This story is part of Current Time TV's documentary series InterNYET, exploring the history of the Russian web.
As this summer's protests showed, Moscow's camera surveillance systems are becoming more sophisticated and more widespread. They're now known as an "all-seeing eye." What these cameras could mean for ordinary citizens’ civil rights concerns many.
Born in a former Soviet research institute, Rambler was Russia's most popular website in the 1990s and was sold for more than $230 million in 2004. But the site was eclipsed by a dynamic new search engine, and its creator counted his profits in the tens of thousands of dollars.
Residents of a housing estate outside Moscow are cooking food on portable stoves after their energy provider switched off electricity citing nonpayment. Turns out the head of their homeowners association is running a huge bitcoin mine in the garage.
A journalist has set up the first local radio station in the remote village of Suusamyr, in the Chuy region of Kyrgyzstan. The station is run mostly by volunteers, and combines reports on lost cows with music and sports.
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