Lukashenko made a royal gift to the Zmagars: How the defeat of Tut.By will turn out
The destruction of the Internet portal TUT.BY has been the most discussed event in the Belarusian media for two days now. Even the plane crash in Baranovichi and the collapse of the bridge in the Borisov region could not overshadow it.
The situation has already gone beyond the borders of Belarus. Tikhanovskaya called the incident a “deliberate murder” of the portal, which “regularly reported honest news to Belarusians and was an example of an independent press.” Amnesty International, the US and EU embassies in Minsk, and many others, including the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry, spoke out in support of the online resource.
The latter is especially poignant against the backdrop of the recent closure of opposition television channels in Ukraine itself, which was completely ignored by the United States, the European Union, and international human rights activists. In short, the typical “this is different”, double standards in their purest form. And in Belarus itself, such double standards are present - the blocking of the popular PolitNavigator and Regnum (which criticize Minsk for being multi-vector) was diligently ignored, and the recognition of some provincial telegram chat as extremist is inflated as an important event.
However, let’s leave double standards to the conscience of those who apply them, let’s talk about TUT.BY and its closure. The attack on the portal itself took place dramatically and in several directions at once.
On Tuesday morning, security forces came to the office with a search in connection with a criminal case initiated for tax evasion. Following this, information appeared that the Supervisory Board of the High Technology Park deprived TUT BY MEDIA LLC of its HTP resident status.
What is interesting here is the combination of these two steps. The HTP resident status provides significant tax benefits, and deprivation of this status means automatic additional taxes from the beginning of the current year. In general, it turned out awkwardly - the basis for initiating a criminal case was created artificially on the day it was instituted. And finally, by Tuesday afternoon, the site was simply blocked on the territory of the republic, along with all the mirrors, so that access to it is impossible even through a VPN. In general, goodbye, TUT.BY!
What is TUT.BY for Belarus? The site was originally created in 2000 as an analogue of Mail.ru or Yahoo. The main things for him were the search engine and mail. Later, he acquired many services and projects, and even tried to create his own social network. In 2021, it was, first of all, a news portal and the undisputed leader of the Belarusian Internet with almost a hundred million visits per month.
The problem was that TUT.BY, although it positioned itself as an independent and unbiased media, however, after the events of August 2020, it was clearly more sympathetic to the pro-Western opposition (however, before, too, but it was not so obvious). The Belarusian leadership did not like this very much, and the site began to have problems, which led to its closure.
The story of the closure of TUT.BY turned out to be ugly. They acted too rudely, and the political motive was too obvious. Although, if the authorities wanted, it would be easy to bankrupt and nationalize it, or transfer it to one of the proven oligarchs. There wouldn't be much less noise, but the combination would look much more elegant.
And so, the authorities received another reputational damage - millions of Belarusians, even apolitical ones, in the morning did not find their favorite website with mail and a bunch of useful services online, and, of course, they will blame the authorities for this.
The Belarusian government is losing the Internet. Or perhaps she has already lost. The gap between TUT.BY in terms of traffic from the nearest pro-government news sites “SB – Belarus Today” and BelTA is more than 10 times. According to Similarweb, in April this figure was 82,62 versus 5,27 and 4,99 million visits per month, respectively. At the same time, the main mouthpieces of state propaganda according to this indicator are not even included in the top five most popular news resources.
There is no point in counting on the fact that the TUT.BY audience will flock en masse to pro-government sites. Statistics clearly show that there is a demand in society for quality journalism that maintains at least the appearance of impartiality. In order to create such media, the state had both the time and all the necessary resources.
Even after August 9, it was possible to make up for lost time by acting more subtly and smartly. However, instead, they relied on absolutely boorish and aggressive propaganda with the manners and vocabulary of street punks. Of course, such propaganda finds its response, but for the majority it has the opposite effect.
By defeating TUT.BY, the state will ensure not control over the Internet, but its degradation. Traditional online media are already being superseded by social platforms - social networks and instant messengers, which are not always possible to control at all. And the Belarusian government again happily slept through this Internet revolution, which its opponents took advantage of.
In the list of TOP-50 Belarusian telegram channels, the opposition absolutely dominates; there are only two pro-government channels. In such conditions, blocking popular sites without creating a worthy alternative to them will only lead to people more often turning to social networks and Telegram for information, which the Belarusian Ministry of Information has not reached.
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