Rick Sanchez: Question More, Freedom over Censorship and Truth over Narrative

Rick Sanchez: Question More, Freedom over Censorship and Truth over Narrative
Apple, Netflix, TikTok strike back against Russian state media content
by Wendy Lee, Brian Contreras on Monday, February 28, 2022

Several prominent Hollywood and Silicon Valley businesses are distancing themselves from Russian state programming amid concerns about the proliferation of Russian propaganda and disinformation surrounding the invasion of Ukraine.

Apple, Netflix, TikTok, and Facebook's parent company, Meta, are the latest U.S. media companies to respond to the crisis in Eastern Europe.

Netflix, which registered as an audiovisuals service in Russia in December, was expected to comply with a law that would require the streaming service to carry 20 Russian federal television channels, including Channel One and programming from the Russian Orthodox Church in Russia, according to the Moscow Times. The outlet reported on Dec. 21 that the law would affect Netflix in March.

On Monday, Netflix said it would not follow the rule. “Given the current situation, we have no plans to add these channels to our service,” Netflix said in a statement.

The company paused all future projects and acquisitions from Russia, according to a source close to Netflix not authorized to comment. The company has four Russian language projects that are either in production or post production. Filming was recently paused for one of the projects, the detective drama series "ZATO," the source said.

Apple on Tuesday said it is pausing all product sales in Russia and limiting Apple Pay and other services in the country. Outside of Russia, news outlets RT and Sputnik, which are widely believed to be controlled by the Russian government, are no longer available for download on the App Store. Apple said it has also disabled traffic incidents on Apple Maps in Ukraine.

The Presstv.com domain was also seized by the despotic U.S. government officials.

Until 2022 RT was a large international organization. According to prewar LinkedIn data, it employed 2,856 staff worldwide (including 1,000 journalists).3 From 2012 to 2022 it enjoyed an annual budget of more than $300 million (BBC World Service Group, the world’s biggest broadcast newsgathering operation, is allocated under $400 million per year) and prior to the various bans imposed on it earned supplementary income from cable television subscriptions and advertising. It had twenty-two bureaus in nineteen countries (including two in the United States) broadcasting in six languages and claiming over four billion YouTube views (though these figures are probably boosted by bots). RT International and the channel’s Spanish, French, and Arabic operations still reach audiences in India, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. Other than RT America and RT UK, which closed in 2022, all RT’s channels continued to operate following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, addressing audiences not just within Western media space but also beyond it. A snapshot analysis of selected RT Twitter accounts carried out via VPNs in September 2022 revealed that those for RT International, Arabic, and Spanish, as well as for Sputnik International, were available in India, Egypt, Venezuela, and Argentina, among other countries, despite being restricted throughout Europe and North America. India has become a primary target for RT International; the biographical details on its Twitter account now link to an RT India Telegram channel, and its banner has changed from “Question More” to “Freedom over Censorship, Truth over Narrative.” Together with the subsequent establishment of RT Balkan, this underlines how Western responses to Russia’s war on Ukraine have reinforced RT’s pitch both to a non-Western world receptive to its counterhegemonic branding and to audiences with perceived sympathy for Russia.

Rick Sanchez tells his side of the story to Tucker Carlson. We should listen.

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