Opposition as “A Mould on the Fatherland”: Hate Speech and Grassroots Telegram Propaganda in Belarus

Abstract

Abstract After the August 2020 protests, citizens of Belarus saw unprecedented repression against government opponents, which has persisted for two years. One of the authorities’ methods has been aggressive hate propaganda in the official pro-government media and grassroots anonymous telegram channels. The anonymous Zheltye Slivy / Yellow Leaks telegram channel became the symbol of this propaganda. The channel’s main feature was its aggressive hate speech, which bordered on the incitement to genocide in its extreme versions. This article focuses on this channel’s rhetoric and semantic and discursive features. For this purpose, the article uses the methods of qualitative content analysis and natural language processing (word2vec). The article results reveal the existence of “hate vocabularies” in the channel’s rhetoric—sets of similar words to describe the opponents and enemies of the authorities in Belarus. The article’s main conclusion is that propaganda constructs the image of “anti-society”—a multidimensional imagined social formation with its hierarchy and institutions, which wages war with the authorities and citizens of Belarus.