When you know you’re being censored, you can protest. But what to do about silent editorial punishment, dished without announcement, by tech platforms that appear to be learning fast how to avoid public outcry?
A year ago, this site had to throw a public fit to resolve a preposterous controversy involving videographer Matt Orfalea and YouTube. The issue centered around the above video, “‘Rigged’ Election Claims, Trump 2020 vs. Clinton 2016,” which despite total factual accuracy was cited under its “Elections Misinformation” policy. YouTube in July of last year demonetized Orf’s entire channel over his content, saying “we think it violates our violent criminal organizations policy.”
As you will see if you click now, the above video, as I argued to Google, could not possibly be violative of any “misinformation” guideline, as it was comprised entirely of “real, un-altered clips of public figures making public comments.” After both Orf and I tantrumed in public — there’s not much else to do in these situations — YouTube sent Matt the “Great News!” that “after manually reviewing your video, we’ve determined that it is suitable for all advertisers”:
We thought the matter was settled.
This week, Orf discovered the video had been re-classified as problematic by a new “human reviewer,” who declared it in violation for “harmful or dangerous acts” that “may endanger participants.” Potential problems, the reviewer determined, included “glorification, recruitment, or graphic portrayal of dangerous organizations,” by which I can only presume they mean former Bernie voters like Orf and myself whose political homelessness apparently constitutes a threat.
I’ve once again sent complaints up the Google/YouTube flagpole. Perhaps Racket readers are tired of digital censorship tales. If so, I understand, I do. I want to underscore that the chief reason now for sharing incidents like this is to show the rapid progression of tactics being used not just against this site, or Orf, but everyone.
In the last 6-8 months — hell, the last 2-3 months — the landscape for non-corporate media businesses has tightened dramatically. Independent media content is increasingly hard to find via platform searches, even when exact terminology, bylines, or dates are entered by users. Social media platforms that once provided effective marketing and distribution at little to no cost are now difficult to navigate even with the aid of paid boosting tools. In other words, even if your business does well enough to pay full retail rates for marketing, a widening lattice of algorithmic restriction across platforms is making distribution for non-corporate media a nightmare anyway.
It’s an unfortunate coincidence that this situation involving Orf arrives as Racket is preparing a story about new techniques being deployed in recent months to reclassify even non-violative true content as misinformation. Like this affair, that coming story touches on a phenomenon we saw repeatedly in the Twitter Files, but didn’t delve into in detail then: the use of deamplification and “visibility filtering” as PR-friendly alternatives to outright bans.
This episode with Orf represents a crack in the system, where the user isn’t formally notified of a demonetization or deamplification decision, but somehow learns of it anyway. How often is it happening when users don’t find out? Also, are these tools being used pre-emptively, for certain topics? There are so many things we need to learn still, about how access to information is being controlled.
Until then, will YouTube do the right thing and fix this particular idiocy? Even for your company, this shouldn’t be a hard call.
If the video above somehow meets your definition of “harmful or dangerous acts,” you’ve gone crazy, in addition to rendering both of those terms totally meaningless. If you believe otherwise, could you at least explain your thinking, so the public can evaluate it?
Tass, the Russian State news service, says that an attempt by Ukraine to blow up the Kerch Strait bridge to Crimea was prevented when the Russians blew up a Ukrainian sea drone.
According to news reports, the Ukrainians tried three times to hit the famous bridge on September 1st.
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The Russians have created a sea barrier of sunken ships to protect the bridge from sea attacks. These obstacles channel any attacking vessel and give the Russian an opportunity to interdict them and destroy them.
But there is more to the story than what is in Tass.
According to a report on the Military Channel, the Ukrainian attempt to destroy the bridge was aided and abetted by US overhead assets coordinating the Ukrainian operation.
The US fielded a Global Hawk Forte II (RQ-48) which is equipped with sophisticated sensors; a US Navy P-8A Poseidon (to track Russian ships and submarines); an Army CL-60 Artemis (Airborne Reconnaissance and Targeting Multi-Mission Intelligence System) and a Navy EP-3E Aries II, a multi-intelligence platform based on the venerable P-3. These platforms were intended to support the Ukrainian attempt to probe vulnerabilities in Russia’s defenses adjacent to and on the bridge while also supporting the Ukrainian counter-offensive in southern Ukraine.
The Russians, at least so far, have said nothing other than they repulsed the attacks on the bridge.
The Kerch Strait bridge connects the Russian mainland to Crimea. It features a roadway and also supports the transit of freight trains. It is a vital roadway for Russian military operations in Crimea, Kherson and Zaphorize. The bridge is important enough that, after it was seriously damaged by a Ukrainian truck bomb attack, and repaired, Vladimir Putin himself drove a Mercedes car across the bridge.
Like the Nordstream pipeline, the US has made no secret of its desire to destroy the bridge. Whether the bridge can survive is anyone’s guess. especially when the US is pouring significant efforts into its destruction.
The overall situation in the Kherson and Zaphorize regions, the focus of the main thrust of Ukraine’s counter offensive, appears to show that Ukraine will not succeed in its declared objectives to breach Russia’s defenses and re-take Melitopol. Meanwhile the Ukrainians have lost significant amounts of armor and incurred heavy casualties. Not only have these losses taken a toll, but many of Ukraine’s best units have been chewed up.
Washington’s best hope is to try and stabilize the front and bring the intense fighting to a halt, buying time for Ukraine to mobilize new forces, train them, and reequip their troops. That enterprise would take six months to a year if it happens. The plan, if it can be called that, is so far based on Russian reluctance to commit the bulk of its forces into an offensive to break the Ukrainian army. While there has been talk about Russia launching a big operation in the Kupyansk area, it has so far not materialized. Some suggest that Russia is waiting for Ukrainian forces to be reduced even further than they are already, before Russia’s generals are willing to risk a true offensive.
The problem for the Russian side is that if they wait too long they will have to repeat everything again and take losses that the Russian public might not be willing to accept. There is a lot of talk in Moscow and on social media, some by serious politicians, that Russia should nuke Ukraine and go home. Others say that Russia should attack the supply depots in Germany and Poland and elsewhere, to in effect strangle the Ukrainian army. None of these proposals have gained much traction, but that could change if the war is drawn out. Oddly, Ukrainian attacks using drones and sabotage of installations on Russian territory may backfire on Ukraine by creating significant public anger in Russia that will require strong action by the government.
The potential for new troubles has been aided and abetted by an interview with Ukraine’s chief of military intelligence Kyrylo Budanov who says that Ukraine should take the war to Russian territory. This would mean using its main army forces to attack across Russia’s border (not just fire artillery shells, send in swat teams, or carry out arson, drone attacks and assassinations). His interview, if it is taken seriously, could have unintended consequences for Ukraine by stepping up the overall Russian response beyond the alleged limits of the Special Military Operation. For example, that could mean massive attacks on Kiev, or Odessa, or other actions designed to cripple Ukraine and its government.
Budanov makes many claims and a good many of them have to be taken with a grain of salt. However, we don’t know which ones the Russians will take seriously.
Meanwhile, Washington continues to take big risks, starting with the supply of cluster munitions and, now, depleted uranium anti-tank shells. The use of US intelligence assets to target Russia is also a risk that could lead to a bigger conflict in Europe. If the Washington escalation continues it is hard to predict what will happen in the weeks ahead.
The crowdfunding platform GoFundMe halted a fundraiser for the news website the Grayzone and refused to transfer over $90,000 raised to the organization.
When Grayzone editor-in-chief Max Blumenthal requested an explanation on August 19, a representative with GoFundMe’s Trust and Safety Team claimed, “Due to some external concerns, we need to review your fundraiser to make sure it complies with our Terms of Service.”
Eight days later, GoFundMe had provided no additional information on their “review.”
GoFundMe’s censorship is the latest in a series of actions by platforms against news websites that are known for opposing United States foreign policy doctrine.
MintPress News had their fundraiser taken down by GoFundMe in March 2022. The following month PayPal banned the organization and MintPress News editor-in-chief Mnar Adley from using the payment processor. Adley was given no explanation for the decision.
In May 2022, Consortium News was similarly banned from fundraising through PayPal. Consortium News editor-in-chief Joe Lauria spoke with an agent in PayPal’s “escalation department.” But again PayPal refused to share details related to the decision to prohibit Consortium News from using the corporation’s services.
These news sites are well-known for scrutinizing U.S. military branches and security agencies and the patchwork of relationships that current and former officials have formed with media organizations, think tanks, and public relations firms.
According to Blumenthal, GoFundMe has agreed to return the funds to donors. The Grayzone has directed donors to give through a new fundraiser posted to Spotfund.
That strongly suggests that stopping donations was never about enforcing GoFundMe’s terms of service. The platform’s goal was to coerce the organization to go somewhere else to fundraise so GoFundMe did not have to deal with pressure from the Grayzone’s vocal detractors in and outside of government.
One of the journalists the Grayzone fundraiser was intended to support is Kit Klarenberg, who British counter-terrorism police detained and interrogated at the London Luton Airport on May 19.
British police questioned Klarenberg about his journalism for the Grayzone and seized his electronic devices. He was asked about his views on the war in Ukraine. While he has not been charged with a crime, an investigation against Klarenberg is still pending.
The fundraiser was also supposed to help pay journalist Wyatt Reed, who was banned from PayPal in June 2022 and then Venmo in November that same year.
In October 2022, Reed traveled to the Donbas to report on the other side of the war in Ukraine—what the war looked like for people living in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions aligned with Russia. While Reed was in his hotel, it was shelled.
PayPal, Venmo, GoFundMe, and other crowdfunding or payment processing platforms face no requirement to be transparent with their users. They can arbitrarily revoke access to their services and follow a blueprint that was largely established in response to WikiLeaks.
As I recounted in my book, Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case Against Julian Assange, on December 3, 2010, PayPal blocked WikiLeaks. The corporation initially maintained that they had done so because the U.S. State Department had concluded that WikiLeaks’ “activities were illegal in the U.S.” (The State Department denied pressuring PayPal.)
The censorship by PayPal convinced Visa and MasterCard to also block donations to WikiLeaks. PostFinance, the financial arm of the Swiss post office, also followed suit and froze the accounts of WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange.
Bank of America banned donations to WikiLeaks on December 18. Later, it was learned that the multinational investment bank had plotted with Palantir, Berico Technologies, and HBGary Federal to disrupt WikiLeaks because Bank Of America was afraid of becoming a WikiLeaks target.
Assange has been detained at the Belmarsh high-security prison in London, awaiting possible extradition from the United Kingdom to the U.S. He faces 17 unprecedented Espionage Act charges that were brought by the U.S. Justice Department.
The journalism that ultimately spurred PayPal to block WikiLeaks is the same journalism that U.S. prosecutors have criminalized in their political case against Assange.
When faced with the financial blockade (that ended a few years later), Assange said, “What we are seeing here are dangerous moves towards a digital McCarthyism. These actions, and the others like it, are not the result of a legal process, but rather are a result of fear of falling out of favor with Washington.”
Little has changed. PayPal, Venmo, GoFundMe, etc, are all afraid of regulation or greater interference by the government. The companies preemptively ban journalists or media organizations, which are considered to be disloyal and repugnant, especially as they challenge the agenda of the U.S. and North American Treaty Organization (NATO) during wartime.
At the height of the censorship against WikiLeaks, the Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) “accepted donations on behalf of WikiLeaks readers.” They did so because WikiLeaks publications were “clearly protected speech” and “no court ever ruled WikiLeaks had broken any laws.” FPF recognized companies were circumventing the First Amendment.
In 2017, FPF announced that the blockade had been over for some time. “We consider the end of the unjust financial blockade an important victory for free expression. We are proud to have been an avenue for WikiLeaks readers to express themselves for the past several years. And if a press organization faces such a blockade again, we plan on being there to fight it.”
Consortium News, MintPress News, and The Grayzone have never been notified that they were suspected of violating any U.S. law or regulation. Instead, companies opaquely deny them access to their services seemingly because they oppose U.S. imperialism and happen to enjoy a wide enough readership to make an impact through their reporting and commentary.
While suppressing such news sites, they infringe upon the freedom of readers to express themselves through their donations.
On a cool morning, the silence of Kherson’s old city centre is broken by a huge rubbish bin being overturned on the pavement. Two men in bulletproof vests calmly scoop the contents onto the road. Dima, a local volunteer coordinator, observes the fetid heap from his porch. “Don’t worry, they’re from the council,” he says, cutting short my rising indignation.
A tractor turns the corner, followed by a dozen men and women with shovels, also wearing bulletproof vests. A few minutes later, the rubbish is in the tractor’s trailer. The group moves on as the first Russian shelling of the day starts up.
There’s a simple explanation for this strange sight: the owners of Kherson’s main garbage collection company have been arrested and their trucks seized. Alena and Dmitry Dubrovsky, who ran the company for 20 years, are facing charges of wartime collaboration for continuing to work between March and November 2022, when Kherson was under Russian occupation.
The regional police department and prosecutors claimed that last summer the Dubrovskys supported Russia’s introduction of the ruble, opened company accounts in a Russian bank and paid taxes to the occupying administration. In other words, they “carried out economic activities in close cooperation with the aggressor state” and “transferred material resources to the occupiers”. This is regarded as wartime collaboration and aiding the aggressor state, the penalties for which are up to five and 12 years in prison, respectively.
The Dubrovskys’ case is one of thousands that are testing Ukraine’s new collaboration law – a law that is currently being challenged by politicians for being too blunt in its punishment of people in occupied territories.
Kherson city court reopened in June, and the Dubrovskys’ case is the first to be heard. They’ve been in custody for four months and have pleaded not guilty. Their legal counsel refused to forward openDemocracy’s questions to the Dubrovskys or to comment on the case, which is ongoing. The prosecutor’s office also declined to comment.
Their garbage trucks remain under lock and key. The city has not been able to secure their release – even for temporary use after the Kakhovka dam explosion flooded Kherson in June.
Kherson: ‘not many collaborators’
According to the Kherson prosecutor’s office, more than 1,000 investigations into collaboration had been filed by the end of June, though only 50 sentences have been handed down so far. Another 234 investigations involve allegations of aiding Russia.
Most of these investigations were started while Kherson was still under Russian occupation, before Ukrainian forces retook control of parts of the east bank of the Dnipro river directly opposite Kherson. The local branch of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) has been investigating residents – primarily those who cooperated publicly with the Russians – and trying them in absentia.
When the city was liberated, leading collaborators such as Vladimir Saldo, head of the regional occupation administration, fled alongside the Russian army. But not everyone left. Law enforcement officers have been reporting daily about their detention of policemen, public officials, head doctors of hospitals, teachers who adopted the Russian curriculum, organisers of the so-called ‘referendum’ in September 2022 on joining the Russian Federation, and other suspected collaborators.
So far, only one in every six investigations has resulted in charges, totalling 159 for collaboration and 33 for complicity with the aggressor.
Many more suspects are listed on Kherson’s ‘traitor database’, an anonymous Telegram channel that publishes data on citizens accused of ties with the Russian authorities. Between one and five new “dossiers” are released on the channel daily.
The channel administrator, nicknamed Nulledo, told openDemocracy that by the end of July the channel had identified at least 2,000 collaborators – “but as a percentage of the total population, there aren’t that many.” (There are one million people in the Kherson region.)
He finds most of his information via social media or networks associated with the occupation. Subscribers to the channel – some 35,000 of them – also send him information.
Nulledo evaded openDemocracy’s questions about payment and refused to clarify whether he works officially for Ukrainian law enforcement or security services. “I’m just helping the SBU speed up the processes a bit,” he said – but he did give us an example of his cooperation with an official investigation.
In February, Nulledo asked subscribers to help him collect evidence against a city resident, Rza Rzayev, who allegedly worked as the supply manager of Kherson’s main market during the Russian occupation. Nulledo does not explain what evidence was collected, but two weeks later police arrested Rzayev and another market worker. In June, they were accused of collaborating and aiding the aggressor, in collusion with the market’s director and chief accountant, who have fled the city. Rzayev denies the charges.
Why did people like Rzayev remain in Kherson after it was liberated? Nulledo said some stayed to look after their property, some hoped to buy their way out of any investigation, and others simply didn’t realise they had committed a crime. He hopes the Ukrainian courts will deliver justice and “everyone will get what they deserve”.
No clear definition of collaboration
Wartime collaboration was added to Ukraine’s criminal code a few days after the full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022.
Andriy Osadchuk MP, the first deputy chair of the parliamentary committee that oversees all amendments to the criminal code, told openDemocracy the process of passing the new collaboration law was “historic”. It was only the second time Ukrainian MPs had been able to gather after the invasion a week before, and 300 deputies adopted the laws without discussing them. Ukraine’s parliamentary opposition had its own proposal on the new collaboration law, but there was no time for political disputes under urgent conditions of war.
“The occupiers were not only on the outskirts of Kyiv, but in eight of our regions. And there were people who were helping them, and we didn’t have a separate punishment for them,” Osadchuk said. “Unfortunately, before the big war, no one wanted to work on this. That’s why we passed what we had prepared in extreme conditions.”
Since then, Osadchuk said, nearly 6,000 cases of collaboration have been opened across Ukraine, more than 1,700 charges have been filed, and about 1,000 have already been submitted to the courts – although about half of them have been heard in absentia, without the accused present.
“All this is the result of our work that day,” Osadchuk said.
The hastily adopted law did not introduce a clear definition of what constitutes wartime collaboration. Instead, it lists eight forms of collaboration, from denying foreign aggression online to serving in the Russian armed forces – which is considered a particularly serious crime. Punishments also vary widely.
Examples of the varying punishments under Ukraine’s collaboration law:
For working an ordinary public job on behalf of the occupying forces, there’s a temporary ban on working for Ukrainian state institutions; for a managerial post, the penalty is up to ten years in prison; for working in the judicial system or the police, up to 15 years. Teachers who promoted the occupation and used the Russian curriculum can receive up to three years in prison. Referendum organisers face up to ten years behind bars, and organisers of pro-occupation rallies up to 12 years.
Just three weeks after the new law was adopted, amendments allowed those accused to be tried in absentia, or kept in custody without bail or house arrest.
Another serious offence was also added to Ukraine’s criminal code: “complicity with the aggressor state”. This is defined as any deliberate activity to help the invaders to the detriment of Ukraine. It includes implementing or simply supporting the decisions of the occupation administration, or the collection and transfer of material resources or any other assets to them.
Osadchuk admitted the wording of the two new laws against collaboration and complicity are too general, echoing each other and other national security offences, including treason.
Various authorities have since tried to explain to the Ukrainian public what kind of activity would be considered criminal, but their explanations have often been contradictory, leaving citizens confused.
Inconsistency and dissatisfaction
In the first investigations against pro-Russian politicians who met the invaders with bread and salt, the case for collaboration seemed clear.
But as Ukrainian law enforcement arrived back in liberated territories across the country, their approaches have begun to differ greatly, with charges and penalties varying considerably from region to region.
Last year, a coalition of Ukrainian human rights organisations analysed how collaboration cases are prosecuted – and found some shocking examples. In Kharkiv, social media posts supporting Russian aggression were treated as ‘mild’ collaboration (punishment: a ban on taking public sector jobs), while in Chernihiv similar episodes were considered “glorification of the aggressor” (punishment: five to eight years in prison).
The application of charges and penalties also vary at the more serious end of the spectrum. The head of the “state bank of the Luhansk People’s Republic” faced five to ten years in prison for “collaboration”; the head of a Russian bank in Kherson faced ten to 12 years for “aiding the aggressor”. The commander of a firefighting brigade in occupied Berdyansk was charged with serious collaboration (12 to 15 years), his colleague in Starobilsk with high treason (15 years to life).
“These cases run the risk of becoming a conveyor belt for statistics, which does not correspond to the demand for justice in society, nor does it prevent these crimes,” one of the authors of the report, lawyer Daria Sviridova, commented.
In a series of publications by the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union, lawyers, judges and even prosecutors concluded that Ukrainian law enforcement often simply fits the actions of suspects to the wording of the criminal code.
One judge in Lviv has even urged her colleagues to stop accepting plea bargains in collaboration cases, because it means they are not evaluating evidence or delving into the motives of defendants.
“Collaboration trials can become a platform for restoring justice, public understanding and laying the foundations for future reconciliation, if these trials are held publicly and openly,” judge Kateryna Kotelva wrote in December last year.
In turn, a leading prosecutor recommended separating “humanitarian” collaboration with Russian forces – e.g. working in housing, transport or other public services, which supports basic necessities under occupation – from “deliberate” collaboration.
The case of Crimea
It is residents of Crimea – who believe that the war with Russia will end with the de-occupation of their peninsula – who have most actively opposed Ukraine’s new law on collaboration, because it potentially affects them all. If Crimea was liberated tomorrow, at least 200,000 Crimeans would face collaboration charges, according to Tamila Tasheva, the Ukrainian president’s representative on Crimea.
“All these years, we have been talking to Crimeans, explaining that they are not traitors and that a significant proportion of them are victims of an armed conflict,” explained Ihor Ponochovny, head of the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office for Crimea and Sevastopol. As of June, Ponochovny’s team has been responsible for only around 100 collaboration investigations.
By contrast, Tasheva’s de-occupation strategy proposes only individuals who actively contributed to the occupation of Crimea should face charges.
Under this plan, officials and teachers would have to go through “lustration” (an examination of their actions to ensure they were not active collaborators), while business people, accountants, doctors and so on would not be punished simply for staying in Crimea, working and paying taxes to the Russian state. That proposal has since been kicked back on the basis that Ukraine should not have a separate criminal law for each region.
Proposed amendments
Several further amendments have been suggested since Ukraine’s collaboration law was first adopted in spring 2022. Serhiy Ionushas MP, head of the parliamentary committee that oversees the criminal code, proposed reducing punishments for “non-serious” acts to community service or fines, while others have argued for increasing prison terms for lawyers who worked with Russian occupiers.
The Ukrainian government, in turn, has proposed that providing or supporting medical care, pensions, critical infrastructure, public utilities, retail, catering and agriculture should not be considered collaboration. Agriculture is a key concern, as millions of hectares of farming land remain under Russian occupation.
Ionushas and Osadchuk’s committee has now written its own amendments bill, but refuses to disclose any details, saying it is waiting for legal assessment. This new bill has been written in conjunction with the former mayor of Melitopol, businessman and MP Serhiy Minko. In conversation with openDemocracy, Minko said the existing legislation “had fulfilled its main function” – preventing people from collaborating with Russia. The new version, he said, would be less radical.
Indeed, Osadchuk claimed the intention now is to scare away collaborators from remaining in the liberated territories. “We’re going to narrow down the liability, so that punishment turns from a cannon into a sniper rifle,” he told openDemocracy.
MPs will no longer be able to adopt new amendments in a single vote, so Osadchuk predicts fierce discussions in Parliament and beyond. If Parliament does not consider them in the first reading before the end of August, then the law will not be changed until the end of the year.
