Google reportedly threatens to delete video from U.S.-based blogger after Russian censor flags it as ‘illegal gay propaganda’

A U.S.-based Russian-language blogger says Google is threatening to delete one of his YouTube posts after Russia’s federal censor flagged it as prohibited content and a Russian court added it to Russia’s Internet blacklist. Court records from late November 2021 confirm that a judge in Vladivostok granted a request by Russia’s media regulator Roskomnadzor to ban a video uploaded to YouTube on June 11, 2019, by a man named Felix Glyukman because the content supposedly violates Russia’s law against “gay propaganda.”

The video, titled “How Did I Realize That I’m Gay?” was added to Russia’s Internet blacklist on November 26, 2021.

On January 4, 2022, Glyukman revealed in a Facebook post that Google notified him of Roskomnadzor’s request, saying that the agency claims his June 2019 video “violates the Russian Law #149-FZ on information technology and information protection.”

“If you do not remove the content, Google may be required to block it,” the message concludes, according to Glyukman’s Facebook post.

Google representatives did not immediately respond to Meduza about the warning sent to Glyukman.

Felix Glyukman says he hasn’t lived in Russia since February 2017. “The taxes on the income I earned from my channel I paid in the United States, and I recorded the video itself while in Miami,” he explained on Facebook, asking, “So why the fuck should I care at all about Russia’s moronic laws?”