(The Monkey Cage/WP) (By Robert Orttung, Elizabeth Nelson and Anthony Livshen) When Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim founded YouTube in an office over a California pizza shop in 2005, they described it as “the ultimate reality TV.” The site reached a large audience by allowing actual people to post authentic footage of genuine, unscripted life.
Now Russian President Vladimir Putin and his propaganda machine are working to take advantage of YouTube’s vast reach and viral capabilities to spread the Kremlin message. RT — the Russian state-funded TV and internet news network – hopes that some of the authenticity associated with the YouTube platform will make its own message more convincing to a broad international audience.
What messages are Putin’s spin doctors pushing? Is anybody listening? The answers to these questions will help to resolve a debate among activists and policy-makers over the importance of Russian propaganda. Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny describes the propagandists as the real “party of war.” The EU now is instructing the High Representative for Foreign Affairs Federica Mogherini to develop a plan to counter Russian propaganda. Others have argued, however, that the Russian efforts have little actual impact.
RT is implementing a sophisticated YouTube program that targets specific messages at well-defined audiences. In addition to the English-language flagship RT YouTube channel, there are seven additional channels aimed at a specific country or linguistic region: RT America, RT UK, RT France, RT Spanish, RT Russian, RT German, and RT Arabic.
The RT flagship channel has a total of 1,471,491 subscribers on YouTube, and for the 32 days between January 19 and February 19, 2015, garnered 10,492,598 views (excluding a handful of videos which did not fit into the categories delineated below). The table below lays out the audience for the other RT channels. After the flagship channel, RT in Russian, Arabic, and Spanish appear to have particularly large followings. The data below represent results from the 2,695 videos uploaded during the month that we examined across the eight RT YouTube channels.
Data: quintly.com; Figure Anthony Livshen
Data: quintly.com; Figure Elizabeth Nelson
Data: quintly.com; Figure Elizabeth Nelson
Data: quintly.com; Figure Elizabeth Nelson
Data: quintly.com; Figure Elizabeth Nelson
Data: quintly.com; Figure Elizabeth Nelson
Data: quintly.com; Figure Elizabeth Nelson
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