SERGEY LAVROV (RUSSIA FOREIGN MINISTER): We are very, very small player in international information war. It's the information — all the information is dominated by the media belonging to the Americans, the Brits, Anglo-Saxons in general, and of course, the Germans, the French, and the others. It's another matter, what is the quality of those information outlets. They more and more become — if you take CNN, they they prefer to avoid analytical materials, and they more and more concentrate on some reports, which would be made of slogans. Russia is an aggressor. Russia is murdering civilians. Russia is abusing sports. And so on and so forth. When they concentrate on TikTok and other resources like this and other platforms, and when they target kids — because TikTok is about young boys and girls — I believe this is an attempt to brainwash them for the rest of their life. And this is indecent and not fair. If you want information and competition, if you want competition among media outlets, then there must be some rules.
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So we we know the manners and the tricks which are being used by the western countries to manipulate media. We understood long ago that there is no such thing as an independent western media. You could take the United States, only Fox News is trying to present some alternative points of view. But when you see, you watch other channels, and when you watch, read social networks and internet platforms, when the acting president was blocked, as you know, and this censorship continues in very big way and the substitution of notions whenever something is happening by the way of mass protest, mass demonstrations, which they don't like, they immediately call it domestic terrorism.
So it's a war, and it's a war which involves the methods of information terrorism. There is no doubt about this. The very interesting example was yesterday when Bild, a newspaper in Germany, published a piece saying that myself, on the evening of Wednesday, left Moscow by plane to go to China. But in the area of Novosibirsk, the plane turned back because either Putin told me to come back or the Chinese said, we don't want to talk to you. It was published by, yes it's a tabloid, but it is millions of copies. And it's a shame that we have these habits being introduced into the information world by our friends and that it is not by incident that Putin said about the existence of the empire of lies.