CNN reporting on the civilian devastation in Ukraine and the remarkable resilience of its defenders. On YouTube, Russians could see Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky and exiled allies of imprisoned dissident Alexei Navalny condemn Putin’s lawless aggression.9 users won’t suffer.” Putin continued to tolerate YouTube’s reach into Russia even after the platform shut down the Western-oriented channels of RT and Sputnik11 and removed more than 9,000 pro-Kremlin channels for spreading disinformation about the war.12 intensified lethal conflict. The same duality characterizes YouTube: It has served as a vital information pipeline to ordinary Russians but in the past enabled Vladimir Putin's propagandists.13 A subsidiary of Google, YouTube is “arguably the largest and most engaging online media-consumption platform in the world.”10 It helps shape how people understand public events, politics, and culture. Its popularity in Russia explains why Putin has allowed it to remain online there, despite the window it has provided on the carnage in Ukraine. Many of his domestic supporters regularly log onto YouTube and would resent its going dark. “We are not planning to close YouTube,” Maksut Shadaev, Putin’s Minister for digital development told The Guardian in May 2022. “Above all, when we restrict something, we should clearly understand that our Other major social media platforms also blocked the Kremlin’s digital megaphones. But as of this writing, YouTube stands out for doing so while continuing to transmit information about Ukraine to Russian citizens. This delivery of uncensored news represents social media companies at their best—akin to how Facebook and Twitter became organizing tools for protesters during the alltoo-brief Arab Spring in the early 2010s. In the years after the Arab democracy movement collapsed, a darker side of Facebook and Twitter became evident as the platforms hosted disinformation undermining elections and racial and religious hatred that Just six weeks before Russia’s multifront invasion of Ukraine, a global coalition of more than 80 fact-checking organizations posted an open letter to Susan Wojcicki, YouTube’s Chief Executive Officer.14 “We monitor how lies spread online,” the groups wrote, “and every day, we see that YouTube is one of the major conduits of online disinformation and misinformation worldwide.” The International Fact-Checking Network added that the company “is allowing its platform to be weaponized by unscrupulous actors to manipulate and exploit others, and to organize and fundraise themselves.” The fact-checkers described how YouTube has spread anti-vaccine conspiracies, election disinformation, and hate speech seeking to foment ethnic conflict. “The examples are too many to count,” their letter said. “Many of those videos and channels remain online today, and they all went under the radar of YouTube’s policies, especially in non-English speaking countries and the Global South.” Signing the letter were the most prominent names in independent fact-checking, among them, FactCheck.org and PolitiFact from the U.S., the United Kingdom’s Full Fact, Philippines-based Rappler, India’s BOOM, and Brazil’s Aos Fatos. RT: Amplifying the Putin Line In response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, YouTube and Facebook blocked the Western-targeted accounts of RT, a news outlet affiliated with the Putin regime and formerly known as Russia Today. (This image is from RT’s website.) But for years before the shut-down, YouTube facilitated the rapid growth of the Russian disinformation channel, which helped Putin spread falsehoods about Ukraine and seek to drive a wedge between the U.S. and its European allies. At times, YouTube even celebrated RT’s success. A platform ‘weaponized’ Given YouTube’s global impact—for good and ill—there’s something anomalous about the platform: Much less is known about it than other major social media sites, especially Twitter and Facebook, which along with Instagram is owned by Meta Platforms. YouTube has been less scrutinized by social scientists, policy makers, and politicians. NGOs and academic-based centers, including ours, have likewise had more to say about Facebook and Twitter than 4 HOW YOUTUBE SPREADS HARMFUL CONTENT – AND WHAT CAN BE DONE ABOUT IT