US IT giants banning Russian content on their platforms testifies to their semantic and technological crisis, censorship of unwanted materials will provoke regulatory restrictions on the activities of these companies around the world, official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry Maria Zakharova wrote on Facebook.
In particular, she commented on the restriction of access to Andrey Kondrashov’s film about Crimea on YouTube, as well as partial blocking of Crimea-24 account on Instagram on the eve of the anniversary of Crimea’s reunification with Russia.
“The platforms have gone haywire. It’s not even about the political implications of the actions of American IT companies, which follow Washington’s guidelines. The situation is more complicated. They generally do not have uniform standards for managing themselves. This is a semantic and technological dead end,” Zakharova noted.
“The more politically inconvenient materials are withdrawn from the Internet circulation and censored by ‘moderators’, the faster and tougher regulatory restrictions on the actions of platforms around the world will be introduced,” she added.
She pointed out that at present, content on US platforms is “arbitrarily and indiscriminately censored” without a court decision or a relevant authority.
At the same time, the US Internet giants continue to call for preserving freedom on the Internet and declare that restrictions on the dissemination of information are harmful.
Zakharova said that such restrictive measures are taken extraterritorially and run counter to Washington’s international commitments to ensure freedom of speech and expression.
According to her, this violates the right of people to freely search, receive and disseminate information. “Washington’s goal is obvious – the use of information technology for unfair competition in all spheres,” she said.
Source: TASS