A former cybersecurity employee from Kansas is just one voice.
In late 2023, Joe Schutzman says he decided to move his family from Kansas to the Moscow region because of his frustration with LGBTQ+ “propaganda” in the US.
In a recent 17-minute YouTube monologue, bespectacled and wearing a black turtleneck, Schutzman describes himself as a “traditional Catholic father of six children.”
He goes on to complain that America has “abandoned God” and is “promoting IVF babies,” suggesting that Russian religious conservatism offers a more appealing lifestyle.
“After spending so many years saying that I don't believe the mainstream media, I didn't really find out how programmed I was until I visited, thinking that Russia was this horrible depressing country,” he said. “So I had to go out and see it for myself, and it couldn't be more untrue.”
At no point in the video or any other on his channel does Schutzman directly reference Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Criticizing the war, after all, would be grounds for criminal prosecution in Schutzman’s new country of residence.
Schutzman previously worked as a technical program manager at US cybersecurity company Red Hat. The company told Bloomberg News Schutzman is no longer employed at the firm.
Now he’s part of a new breed of YouTube influencer bringing an infectious vlogging enthusiasm to a country at war, where media freedoms are severely curtailed. Russian authorities have detained the Wall Street Journal’s Evan Gershkovich for more than a year on espionage allegations that he, the Journal and the US government all deny.
Bloomberg News found 24 creators from Canada, Australia and the US who have either moved permanently or traveled to Russia since the invasion. The two dozen accounts have more than 2 million followers combined.
Recurring themes of the videos include tours of Russian malls and supermarkets to try to show how little Western sanctions have hurt and antipathy towards LGBTQ+ rights. There’s a general reluctance to discuss the war with Ukraine at all. There’s no direct evidence that these influencers are part of a coordinated campaign by the Russian government, which often uses social media to disseminate misinformation.
Still, prominent YouTubers play a vital role in disseminating political propaganda, either to monetize their followings or to air cultural grievances that the Kremlin has long sought to exploit at home and abroad, experts say.
“Russia creates these narratives at massive scale with the goal being to flood the information environment with as many different claims as they can and hope that some of these ideas stick,” says Andy Carvin, senior fellow and managing editor at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.
Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson similarly admired Russian grocery stores during his trip to the country, in which he also interviewed President Putin. (Putin criticized Carlson -- twice -- for not asking serious questions.)
YouTube said in a statement it has remained available in Russia since the outbreak of the war and claimed it’s one of the few ways Russians can access independent news. The company said it didn’t find any violations of its community guidelines after reviewing the accounts flagged by Bloomberg News. YouTube also moves quickly to remove coordinated influence operation regardless of the political viewpoints they support, the statement added.
But influencers like Schutzman show that it can be used to circumvent efforts to block Russian propaganda. He has featured on state propaganda outlet RT — which is banned from YouTube. Another creator who moved to Russia from Canada, Arend Feenstra, was profiled by former RT journalist and fellow YouTuber Konstantin Rozhkov, cross-promoting the interview on his own channel.
That doesn't mean either YouTuber is a plant, or inauthentic. It's “not a crime” for Westerners to be sympathetic to Vladimir Putin or Russia, says Carvin, and social media platforms reward “saying outrageous things and having strong opinions.” But these strong opinions, genuinely held or not, can be parlayed by state-backed outlets into propaganda material.
“These conspiratorial narratives took reach without any kind of connection to the Kremlin,” adds Stephen Hutchings, professor of Russian Studies at the University of Manchester. “But what the Kremlin can do is intervene and promote its own version of these narratives that make the alignment closer.”
Neither Schutzman nor Feenstra responded to requests for comment.