MINSK -- "What's wrong with that cow?" Belarus's hard-line President Alyaksandr Lukashenka asks a deeply-uncomfortable-looking official. "[It's] barely alive."
The clip -- both humorous and chilling at the same time -- shows Lukashenka admonishing regional officials for the state of a farm. It has been shared thousands of times on the Chinese-owned social-media platform TikTok, in particular by pro-government accounts.
Ahead of a January 26 presidential election, pro-government forces in Belarus are making a concerted push to reach young people on TikTok, wary of the unprecedented youth-powered protests around the last presidential poll in Belarus in 2020.
Then, tens of thousands of people took to the streets to protest the election result, which was widely considered by international observers to be rigged. The security forces responded with a brutal crackdown, arresting over 30,000 people, many of whom reported torture and ill-treatment while in custody.
In Lukashenka's Belarus, political opposition is suppressed, the media is state-controlled, and citizens face economic pressures and limited personal freedoms in daily life. Still, the incumbent president will almost certainly win reelection for a seventh consecutive term.
Platform To Vent
Despite the restrictions, TikTok is hugely popular in Belarus, with its user numbers almost doubling from 3.08 million in 2022 to 5.36 million in early 2024, over half of Belarus's 9.4 million population. Belarusians of different ages and from all walks of life use TikTok as a sounding board, talking about prices in stores, the quality of service in state institutions, and what children are taught in schools.
Natalia Pyatkevich, the first deputy head of Lukashenka's administration, has described TikTok as a "nuclear weapon," which allows the regime to be tuned in to the grievances of its citizens.
"In 70-80 percent of cases," she said, describing the problems that Belarusians share on the platform, "these situations could have been prevented at an early stage."
The most prominent pro-government accounts on TikTok emerged in the summer of 2023. First News, one of the largest with 211,000 subscribers, plays up Lukashenka's supposedly down-to-earth qualities, showing the president touring the country and talking about various aspects of his life.
Another channel, Lukashenko Top, with nearly 40,000 subscribers, shares clips of the president's latest political speeches and statements.
The country's staid state media has also got in on the act, mostly publishing news that aligns with government propaganda.
Propaganda researcher Irina Sidorskaya said these accounts "do not write about the West or the Belarusian opposition." Instead, they just "show [what] Belarus [is like], and then praise the authorities for it."
'We Choose Stability'
They essentially focus on two main themes, Sidorskaya said: "we choose stability" -- a staple of Lukashenka's messaging since he became president in 1994 -- and "Belarus is our home."
It's unclear how many Belarusians these accounts actually reach. According to exolyt, a TikTok analytics platform, only 40 percent of First News's followers come from Belarus. The rest are mainly from Moldova, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. Similarly, only 30 percent of the followers of Prostopervy, another pro-government account, come from Belarus.
"A suspicious number of subscribers from different countries," said media analyst Mikhail Daroshevich, "could indicate the purchase of subscribers," with some companies charging around 50 cents for 100 followers.
This wouldn't be a first for TikTok. In the run-up to the first round of the Romanian presidential election in November 2024, TikTok removed over 66,000 fake accounts, 7 million fake likes, and 10 million fake followers, while preventing the creation of over 216,000 spam accounts. The accounts were said to benefit far-right presidential candidate Calin Georgescu, who won the first round.
According to Romania's intelligence agencies, around 25,000 accounts began promoting Georgescu's campaign just two weeks before the election, raising doubts about the authenticity of his social-media presence. With accusations of Russian interference, the European Commission has opened formal proceedings against TikTok for its alleged failure to "properly assess and mitigate systemic risks to election integrity."
Getting their accounts taken down for propaganda is something the authorities in Belarus seem to be prepared for. To protect against removals, pro-government operators set up multiple clone accounts with slightly different usernames. This strategy, according to media analyst Daroshevich, provides backup options in the event of a crackdown by the platform.
Limited Impact
While their numbers are growing, experts agree that the regime's TikTok strategy remains unsophisticated. "They make simplified content: We are for everything good and against everything bad. They are still on the first step," said Sidorskaya. "They're not working with different target groups."
Pavlyuk Bykovsky, a senior analyst at Media IQ, an NGO that conducts media monitoring, also doubts the effectiveness of the regime's propaganda on TikTok -- especially for young people. "Perhaps [state media] do not really understand the specifics of the TikTok platform," he said, and "perhaps they do not understand the specifics of working with young people."
What many pro-government accounts seem to understand is not to overdo the politics, preferring entertainment, funny clips, and music -- even only a few weeks before the presidential election.
So far, there has been scant mention of the upcoming vote and this, according to political analyst Alexander Klaskovski, is because "even the propagandists understand that the election is a production."
"The emphasis is on the fact that Lukashenka's competitors are invisible...that he is unique," Klaskovski said. "The emphasis is not on the [election]...but on the person, on his irreplaceability."
In one pro-government video, Lukashenka mentions the elections but says that "there is no need to engage in them." With only around 500 views, the video didn't attract much attention.
