AliExpress blocked Ukrainian streamer for “promoting violence.” He talked about the war

Before the start of the full-scale invasion, Dmytro Romashko, a Ukrainian blogger, streamed on the AliExpress platform. Since February 2022, Dmytro tried to tell subscribers about the war, and after that was banned almost immediately. The editorial staff of AIN.Сapital spoke with Dmytro and tells the details of this story.

What did he do before the invasion?

Before the Russian invasion, AliExpress provided various options for cooperation on the platform for content creators in the internal social network and had budgets for such activity, as Dmytro says. These could be live broadcasts of bloggers with product tests, offline shows, guest stars, contests and sweepstakes for followers. But from February 24, 2022, such large-scale projects were stopped or frozen.

Dmytro streamed on this platform for five years and traveled to test and show new premieres from China and Turkey. But when he changed the topic of the stream after the Russian invasion, he was almost immediately banned.

Why was he banned?

In the first week of the invasion, Dmytro launched streams from a basement in the Kyiv region to show followers the truth about the war. His audience before the war consisted of viewers from Ukraine, the USA, Spain, but most of them were Russians (the total number of subscribers was 268,000). In the beginning, he hoped to somehow reach the Russian audience, to convey the truth about the war. But his first stream about the war from the basement was banned 10 minutes after the start, for 30 days.

“After the deoccupation of the region, I conducted several streams according to the old contracts in Ukrainian and canceled everything that remained, because I could no longer speak Russian,”

he adds.

He was banned by the platform’s AI “for violating the rules of the contract” that he had previously signed with AliExpress, and the official reason from the platform was propaganda of violence.

“Several of my subscriber friends were mobilized in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Together with the remaining audience and my friends, we help the guys with the military equipment. Yesterday, we bought a new thermal imager, and what an irony — the manufacturer is ThermTec, from China. I’m not interested in restoring the account today, due to China’s position,”

Dmytro says.

AliExpress gives him the opportunity to create promotional codes for subscribers, so sometimes the blogger launches such codes: