Ministry of Digital Transformation to Start Work on Ukrainizing Internet Content: Google Asked to Involve Ukrainian Editors

Ukrainian editors will help select Ukrainian content for the main pages of Ukrainian YouTube.

Ukraine's Ministry of Digital Transformation has proposed that Google increase the share of Ukrainian content on the main pages of YouTube Music and YouTube for Ukrainian users.

To this end, it proposed involving independent editors who would select the necessary content.

The ministry reports that it is working on developing Ukraine's “technological ecosystem”.

Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov and his deputy for IT development Oleksandr Bornyakov met with Karan Bhatia, Google's vice president for global affairs and public policy, during a working trip to the United States. 

Mykhailo Fedorov
Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine 

Digitalization means speed, flexibility and efficiency. This is the kind of thinking we are introducing in the government and adhere to at the ministry. We have been cooperating with Google since the ministry was founded. After all, we want international companies not just to be present in Ukraine, but to scale their business here.

At the meeting, the parties discussed the possibility of optimizing cooperation on the Diia app and on selecting and recommending content for the main page of the Ukrainian version of YouTube Music and YouTube.

The ministry said that Ukrainian users are currently being offered Russian content on their home pages, which is unacceptable while Ukraine is at war — so Google was asked to involve independent Ukrainian editors who would handle content selection. 

The ministry noted that it began cooperating with Google back in 2019 and is actively continuing it. Among some of the joint projects between the ministry and Google is the educational series “Google Tools.” 

Thanks to it, about 46,000 civil servants improved their digital skills. It was also reported about the two-day online course Digital Bootcamp, which taught about 1,000 small and medium-sized business representatives to “effectively stimulate economic recovery” through digital skills.