Right, so there's a YouTube channel I like called Overly Sarcastic Productions. I'm sure many of you are familiar with them - they do a few different series, including History Summarized, a show which goes through the history of countries, empires, cities, etc.
The other day, they put up a video about Kyiv. The video was unusually jingoistic and anti-Russian; they don't normally pick sides in their content (but then, I guess most of the time they aren't talking about current events). On top of this, they spent quite a while equating the people of the Kievan Rus with the modern State of Ukraine, which some more historically-minded people in the comments section had a problem with. A few other people called them out for the petty anti-Russia stuff, but most either agreed with it or didn't seem to mind.
Anyway, I saw it on my subscription feed earlier, and noticed that it had a fundraiser. I found the links in pic rel in the bio.
Long story short, it turns out they the video was literally a piece of Ukrainian-government-sponsored propaganda. BraveVoices is some sort of content hub which encourages people to repost their pre-prepared videos about Ukraine or use their stock footage in original content. From their website:
Ukraine's bravery and resilience in defending against the Russian invasion continue to impress.
However, global attention to the war is waning, and fatigue from Ukrainian news growing. New media and formats are crucial to keep Ukraine on the agenda and maintain global support for its fight for freedom and democratic values.
Their Content page ends with the following:
Promote the UNITED24.MEDIA on YouTube
1.Encourage your audience to subscribe our channel using the handle @United24.media
2.Mention the United24.media channel in your Instagram story or YouTube video and tag it in the description
3.Promote specific content from the United24.Media channel in descriptions to your videos.
4.Add videos from United24.Media to end screens of your videos.
But what is UNITED24? UNITED24 is "the fundraising platform of Ukraine", according to its website.
The video ends with a call for people to donate to UNITED24 and subscribe to BraveVoices, as requested on the BraveVoices website.
They also offer to bring people to Ukraine, which... yeah, I'm happy not getting hit by a kalibr, thanks. I think it's to make content about Ukraine, but I'm not sure who would take them up on that offer (who am I kidding? There are influencers who would jump at the chance).
Oh yeah, the other link is just some kind of charity established in 2014 and based in the US, which isn't suspicious at all. Probably just a money making venture, but who knows.
Either way, this has actually quite upset me. I really liked that channel, and now they've literally just become a propaganda outlet, lying to people en masse.
I've basically accepted than any "liberal" youtube channel or podcast will invariably say something stupid and ignorant about either Russia/Ukraine or China at some point, regardless of how "apolitical" they usually are.
The way this usually works is that a popular channel is approached by a "charity" that asks them to do a special video, usually as a sponsor. They will help out with the "research" on the video and sometimes even the editing, which is very appealing to a youtuber as it can save them potentially dozens of hours of work on their video, and they get paid for it. And if the charity is something they vaguely agree with (i.e. "Russia bad.") Then they don't question it too much.
Tbh, their channel has been lowkey awful for a while. Their discussion of tropes is ok, but very "baby's first fiction, let's just talk about basic libshit like Avatar and Harry Potter and treat every fictional story like a big budget hollywood fantasy or superhero story." And their history stuff has always been pure dogshit. They never know what they're talking about and half the time it seems like their video's only source is a half-skimmed wikipedia page.
Funny you should mention that, because they actually used a Ukrainian wiki page as a source in that video lmao