Authors

Svetlana Bodrunova¹; Ivan Blekanov¹;  ¹ St.Petersburg State University, Russian Federation

Discussion

YouTube-based discussions are a growing area of academic attention. However, we still lack substantial knowledge on whether YouTube provides for forming critical publics in countries with no established democratic tradition. Recently, Toepfl (2020) has suggested a conceptualization for publics in (semi-)autocracies, but current research on Russia has shown that a view on authoritarian publics might need to be more nuanced. Also, the Belarusian post-election protest of 2020-2021 poses a question on the nature of the protest publics and on how the protest consensus had formed. To explore this, we study commenting to six Belarusian oppositional YouTube blogs (international to local) for the whole year of 2018. With 120,000+ comments in our dataset, we define the structure of the commenters’ community, detect the core commenters, and assess their discourse for aggression, orientation of dialogue, direction of criticism, and antagonism/agonism. We show that, on Belarusian YouTube, the core commenters represented a genuine Belarusian audience with no external influence, unlike claimed by the authorities. The public we have found was antagonistic and lacked policy criticism; however, leadership criticism was accompanied by self-criticism and recognized need for involvement (‘who if not us’), which we see as markers of protest readiness. We have also detected cumulative patterns of solidarity formation which add to the theory of cumulative deliberation.