Telegram in Belarusian Protests of 2020: Affective Tool for Populist’s Uprisings GLEB KORAN Gothenburg University Abstract: Certain political uprisings might be associated with this or that particular digital platform (for example, ‘Arab spring’ and Twitter). The 2020–2021 Belarusian protest is well-known for the popularity of Telegram messenger among the peaceful protesters. This large-scale and longest uprising in Belarusian history might be well described as ‘Telegram- revolution’ in future. This article looks into the role of Telegram messenger in mediating the protests to the wider public. The notion of populism by Ernesto Laclau is employed to de- scribe the agenda of the Belarusian protest, which united wide masses of the population against the common enemy, at the same time lacking a strong positive agenda. Paradoxically, two of the most prominent events in the history of Belarusian politics can be described as populist’s in Laclau’s sense. It was the election of Lukashenko in 1994 and protests against him in 2020. Affect here is understood as a specific means with which the users of Belarus- ian Telegram were involved in populist protest of 2020. It operates outside the rational way of understanding politics, emphasising the intensity of involvement itself. The article ex- plores the affective involvement of Belarusian Telegram users in protests of 2020. Keywords: populism, telegram, new media, Belarusian protest of 2020, affect igital technologies are often used as specific tools during various political protests. But technology is embodied in specific platforms that in turn are arranged in a particular way. For example, from 1999 till the middle of the 2000s, the main platform that was used during times of political uprisings around the globe was Indymedia (Platon et. al 2003). It allows its users to create and share news horizontally without any centralized core. Indy- media is based on a non-hierarchical model when any activist can become a journalist. That implied a specific ethical model in bypassing news by the state or private-owned media. D However, with the growth of active users of the internet, the web becomes subordinated by the market logic of capitalism. The global social media platforms are the main drivers of this profit-oriented environment. The model of these platforms is based on the commodifica- tion of user’s interactions (Srnicek 2016; Zuboff 2019). Obviously, for Indymedia (or any other activist-driven platforms such as Diaspora or Identi.ca) it was hard to compete with Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media (digitalicons.org), № 22 (2023): 65–81.