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Comment by asats | Hacker News Reader

I took all of the known remaining propagandists + everything pro-Kremlin that showed up in youtube trending + searched for the most common pro-Kremlin speakers and topics (biolabs, "denazification", etc), then recursively looked through the recommended videos to those channels until any new channels stopped showing up. I ended up with 108 channels in total that had at least some views. So far I cannot find any more with any views, no matter how I search for them.

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You're just moving the goals. What is defined as "propagandist"? What is defined as "pro-Kremlin"?

Pro-Kremlin is the info pushed by the Kremlin state channels, "propagandists" in this case are the people echoing that info, they are fairly easy to spot mostly because they use very different vocabulary (constant talk of "denazification", liberation, biolabls, pinzers, etc) and they tend to move from theme to theme in unison.

"Propagandists" were defined as such by you, right?

I'm not sure what's the point of arguing semantics, call them "people with opinions similar to that of the russian state TV channels". My usage of the word was more along the lines of "historically, propaganda has been a neutral descriptive term of any material that promotes certain opinions or ideologies".

The hacker news audience doesn't like the truth sometimes.

You keep moving the goals. Did you decide their opinions are “similar to that of the Russian state tv channels”? When tagging some channels, but not others, together as "propagandists"/"people with similar views"/"Group A"/whatever, was that tagging your "original research", or was it based on some objective criteria?

The main criteria was their audience similarity on youtube (youtube recommendations), as I told you in the first reply. I took the obvious pro-Kremlin channels and then pulled all of their top recommendations until I stopped finding new channels. Almost all of the top recommended channels were the ones you see in the graph, most of what I removed were various music/movies/etc channels.

There's a similar network of obvious pro-Ukrainian propaganda out there on youtube as well, and a large anti-Kremlin russian opposition network, they are all fuzzy but you can still see the clusters as similar channels have similar audiences and get cross-recommended by youtube.

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