Continuing to monitor the activity of Belarusian YouTube channels owned by state media to more thoroughly analyze the narratives used and fact-check the most noticeable and significant fakes.
For this, we use a specific established algorithm for monitoring and utilizing AI-based tools.
First, let’s look at the basic characteristics of the results for October 2024. We will start with the number of posts and channel dynamics since July 2024:
We added the Belarus 24 channel. The NEWS.BY channel experienced a significant drop in views. A possible reason could be the consequences of the blockage, which we reported earlier.
Distribution of the number of posts across channels:
This chart shows 2087 videos posted on ten state-owned YouTube channels in October 2024 by date and how many views were gathered by November 1, 2024.
The full interactive version of the chart can be found here.
Let’s add a “word cloud” formed from the video descriptions excluding “stop words”:
It is expected that the pro-government channels will promote a single politician, but “Haidukevich” is also noticeable in the cloud.
Now let’s create rankings for the most viewed videos. We’ll start with all videos:
Only videos from three of the ten channels made it into the top twenty. The lower threshold was 1 million views.
Now let’s remove “short videos” (shorts) of the previous length of 60 seconds and select 20 videos by the number of views:
The entry threshold was 347 thousand views.
Now videos longer than 3 minutes, the new definition of short videos on YouTube:
Surprisingly high rankings for videos over an hour long featuring Montyan, who has repeatedly been noted for spreading Russian disinformation narratives and fake information.
The final ranking will include only videos longer than 10 minutes, i.e., reports and extensive interviews:
Almost all the videos in this list are related to the war in Ukraine and reflect the position of the aggressor country, the Russian Federation.
Let’s examine the engagement of state-owned videos in October 2024. K-means clustering:
This chart again includes all videos from these ten channels. The full interactive version can be found here. It can be noted that deviations from the average, which are most often signs of videos supported by promotional advertising, are few.
The most illustrative graph about engagement:
On the X-axis is duration, on the Y-axis is likes, the heat map reflects the number of views, and the size represents the number of comments. The full interactive version is available here.
For further fact-checking publications, we will prepare a narrative clustering chart by topic:
Full interactive version here.
Let’s summarize briefly. Belarusian state YouTube channels continue to produce a massive number of videos every month. The majority of views are gathered by videos dedicated to the war in Ukraine, and based on their content, they contain Russian disinformation narratives and are targeted at the Russian audience, which makes up the majority of these channels’ subscribers. It is necessary to analyze the content of the most popular videos to identify fake information and perform debunking.