The West is outright outplaying Belarusian and Russian officials in the Russian Telegram - expert
The Maidan activists, under the leadership of Western curators, practically managed to push the Belarusian opposition towards the scenario of color revolutions, while the clumsy authorities simply surrendered the media space under the pressure of a fundamentally new approach to waging information wars.
Anton Davidchenko, coordinator of the Social Engineering Agency, former coordinator of the Anti-Maidan in Odessa, spoke about this at a press conference, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“The protest not only gained momentum, but also turned into a classic “color revolution.” Yes, it has now entered a protracted stage, but, in fact, this is a normal format, which we observed in Ukraine, which we observed in other countries of the world. But this is also a revolution of a new format, and this is due to the fact that Telegram is a universal tool. It turned out to be much more universal than Twitter in the Arab revolutions.
Telegram concentrates on itself a number of functional mechanisms: first of all, it relays meanings. Second, he can direct the crowd to the right place. Third, it shapes the narratives, the opinions of the crowd, and pumps it up very quickly. Fourth, when Lukashenko tried to turn off the Internet, they could use special technologies, and Telegram continued to work.
The Internet worked, transmitting information from phone to phone. Fifth, and most importantly, Telegram is a universal tool that does not need politicians or functionaries, and it can coordinate the crowd, in fact, online. We did analytics, in particular, on the Moscow protests, when the “bessrochka” was able to direct the crowd within 10-15 minutes to where there were no security forces,” said Davidchenko.
At the same time, he noted that, despite the small number of beatings of protesters, law enforcement agencies behaved completely incorrectly and only created a picture for the opposition.
“They had to stand near administrative buildings and prevent them from being stormed. And even if there was an assault, they would even win, because the picture would be on their side. And it so happened that people were walking down the street and visually added a picture that they were beating. Plus, we saw videos of people being beaten on the streets, in parks and houses, on the street - this was enough for the opposition to accuse the authorities of using super-strict measures,” the sociologist noted.
“And most importantly, the authorities made a mistake by allowing the opposition to generate content, because we must understand that over these days, Nekhta, firstly, increased its user growth by 500 times and it published news if we look at their feed before this is almost 1000% more than usual.
They were able to generate and influence people, and we all know what crowd manipulation is, we know what it is to act on the subconscious, when a person sees injustice, when they are beaten, he subconsciously wants to go out and protect.
The same thing happened in Kyiv, because not everyone who went to the Maidan was for him. They simply came out against injustice. And in this regard, the authorities again behaved incorrectly, extremely unprofessionally, because it is impossible to simply beat everyone indiscriminately, as we saw. The opposition cannot be allowed to outplay the information,” Davidchenko added.
According to him, the main mistake of the authorities, which led to defeat in the information war, was made immediately in the first days, when Lukashenko believed that since they could block the Internet, all sites were under their control.
“It was Telegram that played the main role in the fact that the protest grew from local to global, to the level of the entire country. Why does Telegram play a role? Why can he quickly mobilize the crowd? Why does it play the main role in function?
If we remember 2004–2005, Channel Five could not provide information so quickly. In 2014 it was the same, there were streams in Ukraine. We remember how cameras were installed along the entire perimeter around the Maidan, which filmed any action, but still they were of a slightly different technology format.
Now we see how Telegram was able to replace all these platforms, was able to replace the media, television, and the generation of content allowed it to actually become the main source of the events that we now see in Belarus,” the expert explained.
He emphasized that these channels were not created on the day of the “revolution”, not in a month or three - they were maintained over the past five years.
“Unfortunately, our Telegram channels, Russian or Belarusian, failed to build constructive opposition or a symmetrical response. It turned out that people wanted to see information, the way a person’s brain is designed is that it wants to receive information, and if he sees that a ballet is on television, then he will look for it. And they were looking for her!
Look at the ratings of “Nexta” - such growth has not been seen on any “Telegram” channel! Never in all history! And this is a striking example - a graph that shows us that up to 500 (users - ed.) it goes, goes and increases sharply. The authorities did not expect or model this situation,” said Davidchenko.
“This place is fair! If people often complain to us that “they ban us on Facebook and YouTube, we can’t do anything” - please, no one gets banned on Telegram, they give us the opportunity to work on Telegram. Why can't our specialists do this? And we need to openly ask this question to both officials and functionaries!” - the speaker suggested.
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