Массовые политические протесты в Республике Беларусь летом-осенью 2020 года: причины возникновения, социальная база, цифровая инфраструктура

Abstract

The article presents the results of a study of the causes, social base and digital infrastructures of mass political protest in the Republic of Belarus in the summer-autumn of 2020. When implementing the study, the authors relied on two key methods: automated social and media analysis and cognitive mapping. Internet content was uploaded via the IQBuzz automated social media monitoring service. As a result, a dataset was compiled, including 700 thousand messages from 30 major social media. Within the framework of the study, a social and media analysis was carried out in three areas: the pro-government agenda, the opposition agenda – elections and the opposition agenda. In the case under consideration, the growth of interest and the inclusion of a female audience in information flows on protest topics in social media is recorded. This can be directly linked to the inclusion in the list of triggers of mass protest: victimhood, violence, and women's participation, which elicits an emotional response based on feelings of solidarity and empathy. In addition, the authors note that mass protests in the Republic of Belarus are characterized by an adult social-media and offline audience. The experience of Belarus has demonstrated the transit in the context of protest moderators: from public opinion leaders to social networks that allow not only to broadcast information about the protests, but also to form specific instructions with an action plan for the protesters. Informal opinion leaders become a tool for attracting attention, but the protest is moderated by social networks. All these trends demonstrate a change in approaches to the organization and management of protest actions, which affects their stability and the degree of manageability. Hence, this work allows us to establish a new reality of political and civil protests, which will show why traditional methods of neutralizing protest activity do not work in the current reality, which later becomes one of the reasons for revising the classic tools in leveling protest actions and the effects that they create.