On Tuesday, Bloomberg news agency reported that Google, which owns YouTube, had dropped RT from its package of the most popular channels aimed at ad buyers. RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan had already announced that the TV channel might cease its activities in the United States due to increasing pressure from the country's authorities.
The network was also dissatisfied with the way in which the news that RT had been dropped reached the public.
"It is absolutely unacceptable that such internal info appears by means of leakage from Google to the US media without any notifications in advance. This speaks to the unprecedented political pressure increasingly applied to all RT partners and relationships in a concerted effort to push our channel out of the US market entirely," Kirill Karnovich-Valua Karnovich-Valua said, as quoted on the RT website.
