Belarus Disinformation Map · Who copies whom Who attacks whom When How: DISARM techniques TikTok
Who attacks whom
Belarus Disinformation Map, Stage 1, preliminary. Attacks on independent media, civil society and political actors on Telegram and state YouTube, January–June 2026.
Preliminary · closed session · not for publication
What the attacks show
Non-state channels do the attacking
On Telegram, pro-regime bloggers and anonymous channels attack independent actors in 4.5% of all their posts; state media in 0.3%, ministries in under 0.1%. The Zheltye Slivy network alone produced 1,783
On YouTube the broadcasters attack themselves
SB TV attacks in 105 of 1,638 videos (6%), NEWS.BY in 62 of 973 ; Minskaya Pravda’s “Politika” in one video in four. A video and a post differ in size, so the two platforms’ shares are not compared directly.
The target is a label more often than a person
“Beglye” appears in 2,722 texts of 62 actors, “zmagary” in 2,468 . The most attacked person is Tsikhanouskaya: 841 texts from 46 actors. Journalists, experts and activists are attacked by name in 215 texts; the map shows them only as a total.
Under review
Two YouTube channels with the highest attack shares are outlined dashed and not named: 23 of 26 videos and 15 of 42 . Their class is still being checked.
Platform:
Telegram
YouTube
How to read the map. Actors on the left, addressees on the right. Ribbon width: the number of texts or videos in which the actor attacks the addressee; one item can attack several addressees. A second model reading checked every item–addressee link and dropped those where the addressee is only mentioned: it confirmed 97% of links on Telegram and 88% on YouTube. That is agreement of two models, not a human check. Click an actor or an addressee for details.
Attack layer, January–June 2026, one codebook for both platforms: it records whom an item attacks, not whom it mentions. YouTube is coded in full and shares are taken over all of a channel’s videos. On Telegram the texts that name independent actors are coded; an identical text in several channels is coded once and counted for every channel, and the Zheltye Slivy network counts as one actor. Telegram shares are taken over all posts of the channel in the period and are not shown for channels with fewer than 100 posts (on YouTube, fewer than 20 videos). Addressees are matched to a dictionary of public figures, organisations and generic labels; forms outside it are dropped, so private persons never reach the map, and journalists, experts and activists named in the texts appear only as a total. Foreign addressees are not shown for Telegram: they were coded only next to domestic ones, and the count would be too low.