And if that were true, they would not have de-platformed Trump and they wouldn't take down lots of other high traffic content (eg anti vax) that they do.
Russia has a mediocre economy, mediocre median standard of living, mediocre consumer economy, zero economic growth for a decade, and a disaster of a future economically going forward.
US big tech all by itself generates more surplus cash (capital available for saving after expenses) every year than the entire nation of Russia does.
Russia is an economic weakling and provides no great allure for big tech.
Deferring all decisions to an opaque algorithm isn't the most responsible approach, it's just the cheapest. Worrying about externalities of their services costs money and produces little, so they mostly don't.
The fact that their approach can be used to help horrendous warmongers is not intentional, but maintaining a system that can be used in that way is.
I do agree though, this is most likely just the nature of the problem of trying to moderate such a massive amount of video content.
Some will be caught in the net and attribute agency to the process when it was just completely random.
I mean there is 50k watching a live stream of Kyiv right now.
I mean, it's not like this idea is unfounded. Trump has praised Putin many times, including during the current invasion. Meanwhile, Putin has been very friendly towards Trump.
I think the "Russian election interference" stuff is very overblown, but it's pretty clear that Trump respects (and maybe even idolizes) Putin.
One other problem with what you said is that I think the cause and effect goes the other way. The democrats are anti-Trump in part because he's pro Putin. They're not anti-Putin because Putin is pro-Trump. Being anti-Putin is very simply a matter of being anti-dictator and doesn't require tying Putin to a controversial US political figure.
It's almost like the conman Trump says one and does the other, but because he's our political nemesis this does not matter anymore, and all of the sudden we start believing what he says and not look at the actions.
Tell me, is this praising Putin, or trying to put some sense into Germany:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRyuW51M_fI
https://publimetros.publimetro.us/2018/07/trump-blasts-allie...
The point was: big tech is exclusively run by people that dislike the perceived Trump | Putin axis, and there's nothing to debate about it frankly, it's something beyond overwhelmingly the case.
I stated no position on whether I thought that was good or bad.
There was no problem with what I said in fact. I never declared cause and effect (order to why such was the case), that'd be a pointless distraction from the core (and would merely prompt endless opinion thrashing based on partisan beliefs on this forum, or most any forum these days). I simply stated the part that they're quite obviously anti-Putin, and they are. Why for the purposes of the thread doesn't matter. Thus it's more interesting that they'd be blocking pro-Ukraine content and most likely indicates it's not their preference and is an automation problem that they'll have to manually act against.
“The 1980s called, they want their foreign policy back.” - Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama.
Remember how all the journos and Democrats barked and clapped at that line like trained seals whenever you read them now angsting over Russia.
Big tech more likely wants to censor the Kremlin than the pro Ukraine wing. Which leads me to believe this is YouTube getting trapped in its own algorithmic approach to moderation, until or unless they can manually intervene.