PewDiePie sponsored an opposition protest in the center of Moscow. Confirmed by leader of Russian Libertarian Party Mikhail Svetov (at the end of the post)



Независимы исследователь оппозиции



Youtubers from around the world seem to be involved in supporting protests in Russia, masking their intrusion and undermining with memes, a recent research shows.





A demonstration against censorship on the internet held in Russia on the 10th of Match was discussed two days later in a talk show hosted by Vladimir Soloviyov. In particular, some of the suspicious banners written in English appeared on the screen:

https://youtu.be/jh4TppPMjjw?t=2h10m6s

Looking up the images online revealed some clues as to where those could have come from.





Turns out, the demonstration leader himself, Mikhail Svetov of Russian Libertarian Party, has been posting banners in English in his twitter: https://twitter.com/msvetov/status/1105237038499012608





The picture shows three young men holding banners saying "Subscribe to pewdiepie"





"pewdiepie" appears to be the most subscribed youtuber with 89 million subscribers. One might think those are just teenagers hyping their idol. Looks innocuous, until you see THIS: https://www.reddit.com/r/PewdiepieSubmissions/comments/azv9vg/the_rally_for_free_internet_in_moscow_has_turned/





This is a video from the action uploaded to a popular foreign website called Reddit (similar to Pikabu of ours). It gained the score of over 20k points and made it to the top-scoring posts.





I’d conducted a small investigation, surprisingly resulted in a fact, that even foreign YouTube-bloggers interfere [in our internal affairs] and assist protest against russian autrhorities,avoiding any responsibility by usage of so-called ‘memes’ as a camouflage.





Surpsingly, it was uploaded to the pewdiepie subreddit. As it became clear after asking various users, it contains the song which Pewdiepie used to insult T-series, his rival who also has about 89 million subscribers. In this song he calls T-Series a “bitch lasanga”. According to site users, the youtuber goes to extreme measures to gain as much attention (and subscribers), because he is obsessed with the possibility of being outnumbered by the rival (who doesn’t really care, by the way, but that doesn’t interfere with Pewdiepie hyping this topic).





“Mediazona” [translator’s note: russian mass media organization] made an article about that on the spot. Even the rally organizer boasts about this and calls the situatuion a “meme war” (while linking the article): https://twitter.com/msvetov/status/1105449859677605891









What’s the most probable conclusion we can make out of these facts? To be honest, there are several versions, all of them pretty hard to believe:





Pewdiepie (he is Swedish) works with government or with agencies (maybe with American ones too). Despite his videos being in English, they always have Russian subtitles, and his videos often getting dubbed and uploaded to other channels. He has big young audience. And it is just right for those who want to fuel the protest among youth, and also spread news among foreigners with making memes like "Russians have protests and some of them supports famous YouTube channel in the war against another famous YouTube channel". As we all know, memes can spread among really huge audience, including Russian youth, which later can be told that there are bad people in Russian government, and foreign audience can be told that we need to impose sanctions on Russia.





Personal initiative of Pewdiepie, in which he is even ready to finance protest for the sake of his own popularity. I think it is quite likely. Create meme and give it a push to spread is a great opportunity to make clout, even if it looks strange.





Attraction of sponsor. We can look at it differently. As I heard from the leader of the Libertarian party, the party is very poor and seeks money. Maybe they started to aim at the famous youtuber to gain attention of foreign audience, and then sponsors can pay attention to the "poor" libertarians.





Maybe it's all sound like bullshit and youth just has nothing to do and makes this crap (it is the 4th assumption) but forewarned is forearmed





Final proof: https://www.reddit.com/r/PewdiepieSubmissions/comments/b15c4a/pewdiepie_sponsored_an_opposition_protest_in_the/



