The February elections*, announced by the Central Election Commission of the Republic of Belarus, and the anticipated elections to the Coordination Council, are drawing closer. YouTube plays one of the key roles in covering political events in Belarus, and this will be the third publication following the overview and November publication.
In the study of media consumption by the Belarusian internet audience in the country and abroad, conducted in September-October 2023 by the initiative of the Digital Skills Coalition and the Belarusian National Platform, respondents in Belarus and abroad named YouTube as the main source of news and other information (multiple responses were possible):
Using social media monitoring platforms, 25 videos were collected, whose titles contained the theme of elections.
Together, these posts gathered about 900 thousand views. This sharp increase is associated with the presence of the NEXTA Live channel. It’s worth noting that this channel has 37% of subscribers from Ukraine, about 25% from Russia, and just over 11% from Belarus.
The distribution of stories by electoral campaigns was as follows:
- Belarusian elections* — 12;
- Presidential elections in the Russian Federation – 7;
- Elections in the USA — 4;
- Elections in the Coordination Council (CC) — 2;
- Elections in Ukraine — 2;
- Elections in Serbia — 1.
According to data from previous months and December 2023, only Еўрарадыё mentions elections to the Coordination Council in its headlines.
Let’s examine the disinformation about the elections in Ukraine.
In an interview with the BelTA news agency, political scientist Vadim Elfimov, a lecturer at the Belarusian State University and a graduate of the Kyiv State University, used figures about the destruction of the Ukrainian energy system, predominantly circulated by Russian information sources in 2022.
As of today, the electricity deficit, according to data from the National Energy Company “Ukrenergo”, is 1%, covered by imports from Slovakia, Romania, and Moldova.
During the summer period and the warm autumn, planned maintenance was carried out at all nuclear power plants in Ukraine, except for the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant captured by Russian occupiers.
The political scientist, along with the show’s host, speculated that one of the options for changing power in Ukraine could be through destruction by Russian troops, but if the Russian Federation, as an aggressor country, wanted to do this, it would have supposedly done so long ago.
In a talk show BUDNI on the SB TV channel – Alexey Belyaev, Dean of the Faculty of Journalism at the Belarusian State University, political scientist, talked about the very low rating of the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky, who would lose the election at the current moment to any other Ukrainian politician.
What one of the political ratings (this is not the only existing one) actually looks like:
The political scientist speculated that by canceling elections, Ukraine “dooms its citizens to further grinding in a senseless bloody war”. It was then stated that the governance of Ukraine is carried out beyond its borders by some “top echelons”.
The program “To Be Continued” by Gleb Lavrov is the absolute leader in the number of manipulations and disinformation about electoral campaigns.
In the December issue, elections in Serbia and subsequent protests were touched upon, which are, of course, connected with the State Department and OSCE. The upcoming elections in the USA and the European Union. The entire plot is accompanied by strange sarcastic jokes, at the level of household rudeness.
The “Scare Stories” section:
In the show #MarkovNothingPersonal, political analyst Yuri Shevtsov aka guralyuk from LiveJournal and a long-time former employee of the European Humanities University (EHU), discusses the threats of artificial intelligence (AI) to electoral campaigns. In particular, it is recommended to control the use of AI in Russia and Belarus to avoid such influence as Telegram had in Belarus in 2020, when it “led people through the streets like a herd”. It turns out that Belarus has a know-how for direct communication of the state with politically active people, bypassing information technologies (sic!). The host of the show boasted about the beginning of the use of artificial intelligence in PolitStandUp shows.
It has been noticed that explanatory videos about elections* are regularly published on Fridays on the CTVBY channel.
Which gathered just over 4,000 views, with more than 800,000 subscribers, only 22% of whom are from Belarus.
The remaining less than two months before the elections* in Belarus will bring a lot of new unreliable content (disinformation), which will require careful monitoring and subsequent study for debunking and prebunking.
