Antifake / Factcheck

29 July

Fact-Checking: Belarus 1 TV Host's Claims About RuTube vs. YouTube Debunked

RuTube is just one year younger than YouTube.

Users across Russia began to experience outages and problems with YouTube services on the night of July 11–12, 2024. Following the news, Andrei Sych, a host of the state-run TV Belarus-1, said there are alternative platforms in the country, although “they lag and freeze sometimes.” He attributed the lag and suspension issues of the services to their youth compared to YouTube. The Weekly Top Fake team clarified their ages.

According to ‘Rostelecom’, YouTube's slow speeds in Russia are due to technical issues: Google has left the country and no longer maintains its servers, which are worsening.

However, some Russian media, citing independent sources, reported that the Russian authorities were deliberately 'throttling' YouTube and preparing for its complete blockade. Alexander Khinshtein, the head of the Russian State Duma's Information Policy Committee, confirmed that YouTube download speeds in Russia were intentionally dropped due to the hosting's anti-Russian policy. 

This news was discussed on the air of Belarus’s state-run Radio Minsk on July 16, 2024. Here is what was said by both studio guests Kirill Kazakov, the editor-in-chief of Minsk Courier, and Andrey Sych, the presenter of Belarus-1 TV, and radio host Alena Rodovskaya. In particular, Andrey Sych noted Russia has alternative platforms such as RuTube.

“Their VK platform is wonderfully developed now, but RuTube has been glitching and continues to do so,” Alena Rodovskaya said.

“I won't agree. RuTube is running fine, everything is good,” Kirill Kazakov responded.

“I sincerely hope they will fix it…” Andrey Sych added.

“We've been sincerely hoping for two years already,” Rodovskaya objected.

“You know, there are alternative platforms. The fact that they are lagging and freezing up somewhere is self-evident. YouTube wasn't built in a day,” Sych explained.

Indeed, YouTube has been evolving for 19 years now. The video platform was launched in 2005 as an online video-sharing platform and was later bought by Google. The platform currently boasts over two billion monthly visitors.

RuTube is just one year younger than YouTube. The Russian video-hosting service was created by two entrepreneurs from Oryol, Russia, and launched in 2006. 

Gazprom Media later acquired Rutube: a controlling stake in 2008 and the rest — in 2020. The investor pledged to make the Russian video hosting service on par with YouTube.

Over the last three years, its audience has grown 15–fold, attracting around 50 million users monthly.

Send information that seems suspicious to you — we will check

Other Antifakes / Factchecks
https://belarusfiles.org/en/fakenews/rutube-vs-youtube-wtf
belarusfiles.org
CC-MAIN-2024-33
37573
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:JWFGHKJA5XXHFH5KSSIK6BYVPPTTXZSU
<urn:uuid:d3a598dd-a2e7-427b-9114-dd68a409dacb>
2024-08-14T20:20:30Z
5.187.7.118
text/html
sha1:BSB4WUN2GGB42DQGHXJH6PESXTPUS2QA
<urn:uuid:137cc9bc-e538-4ec3-b649-99dd089b4b32>
https://belarusfiles.org/en/fakenews/rutube-vs-youtube-wtf
response
<urn:uuid:32a744bf-685f-4058-acf3-c64107761586>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2024-33
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for August 2024
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-36
software: Apache Nutch 1.20 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.5-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/