Upcoming elections* in Belarus and the elections for the Coordination Council (CC) require the study and monitoring of content on all possible popular platforms. It is important to understand how much of the content posted is disinformation in various forms, from simple manipulations to deepfakes and complex longitudinal communication campaigns.
In a study of the media consumption of 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 Instagram among the top three sources of news and other information. For the Belarusian female audience in the country, Instagram is the leading social network in terms of usage.
Collecting data on Instagram is more difficult than on Facebook because it is not possible to sort posts by regional feature. Therefore, the collected data has to be cleaned from irrelevant posts from all countries where Cyrillic is used.
For example, a total of 1010 posts were collected:
The peak occurred on the date when the incumbent Russian president decided to run for another term in the Russian Federation. Interestingly, the social network Instagram is blocked in Russia, but some Russian influencers decided to make publications supporting the decision of their country’s leader, citing an 80% approval rating from a pro-government sociological campaign by VTsIOM.
After cleaning the data, 88 posts were left for study, which were posted in 44 sources. Difficulties were caused by accounts of the armed forces of the CSTO and the BelRos TV channel. The TV channel made 6 publications, of which only one was directly related to the topic of elections* in Belarus.
The post that gathered the most interactions was from a newspaper with state ownership in Baranovichi, with a New Year’s greeting from Mikhail Batsenko, chairman of the Baranovichi City Executive Committee:
Interestingly, the elections* are not the first important event in the city for the appointed vertical official, who can mistakenly be called “mayor”.
Elections to the Coordination Council were reflected in 6 publications. Two publications were made by the Coordination Council itself:
Two publications concerned repression against the families of current members of the Coordination Council:
One publication was made in the “News of Stolin” account, representing the state-funded media “Navi Palesse”. This publication is an example of hate speech, sowing discord among citizens and containing elements of misinformation.
The collected publications are illustrated with a “word cloud” of the words used in these posts:
An interim conclusion can be made that Instagram accounts of Belarusian state media in December 2023 did not publish disinformation about elections in other countries. Their publications aimed to inform about the single voting day, the logo of the election campaign, and other accompanying information about the elections*.
