Russia's Interior Ministry says YouTube is advertising illegal drugs and it knows it

Russian officials aren’t happy with YouTube. Not only is the world’s largest video-sharing website now under threat of being blocked in Russia for failing to delete videos shared by politician Alexey Navalny, but a senior anti-drug official in the Interior Ministry testified before the State Duma on Thursday that YouTube’s administrators refuse to work with Russian police to take down advertisements for illegal drugs.

Commercials for a darknet illegal drug market called “Hydra” started appearing on YouTube in August 2017. Following an intervention by Russia’s media regulator (Roskomnadzor) and the Interior Ministry, the ads eventually disappeared. Now Interior Ministry officer Andrey Khrapov says they’re back, and roughly 33 million Russians have already seen them since early February.

Despite YouTube's apparent intransigence, Khrapov says the Russian social network Vkontakte is actually the source of 89 percent of all reported cases involving the advertisement or sale of illegal drugs in Russia.