In March 2024, data allegedly collected by Social Blade was distributed on social networks. According to their statistics, almost 9.5 million Ukrainians watched the Russian President’s speech online. We have verified the veracity of these messages.
On February 29, 2024, Vladimir Putin addressed his annual message to the Federal Assembly. The next day, reports appeared on the Internet that, according to Social Blade estimates, 27 million people around the world watched the Russian president’s speech live on YouTube. “It turned out that 35% of them were on the territory of Ukraine! Very bad news for Zelensky,” writes the Telegram channel of the publication “Ukraine.ru"(180,000 views at the time of writing this analysis). Channel "Kot Kostyan - official channel"(114,000 views) clarifies that we are talking about 9.45 million Ukrainians. The authors of the channel provided slightly different data “GCD in Ukraine"(11,000 views): they report 37% of viewers from Ukraine, which is almost 10 million people.
According to the TGStat service, at the time of writing this analysis, about 120 similar posts were published on Telegram, receiving a total of almost 1 million views. Such recordings were posted by the channels “Ne.Sugar"(278,000 views), "Mriya"(50,000), Nina Vatt (40,000), "Pavel Onishchenko" (23,000), "For real"(16,000), etc. Similar publications are found in public pages and on the personal pages of VKontakte users (examples here, here, here, here And here), as well as in "Zene"
Social Blade is a project that collects data from YouTube, X, Twitch, Daily Motion, TikTok, Instagram and other platforms, and then uses it to create statistical graphs and charts to analyze the popularity of blogs. By data service, it currently monitors the statistics of almost 63 million YouTube channels. However, none of the publications mentioned above provide a link to Social Blade's research on viewing Putin's speech. Instead, in some posts contain a one-minute video on this topic or a screenshot of it. In the upper right corner of the video is the logo of the American magazine Wired.
The video is a compilation of fragments from several video recordings, including excerpts from Putin’s speech, and is accompanied by English subtitles:
Social Blade: Putin's message was watched live by more than 27 million people.
YouTube statistics showed that more than 27 million users around the world watched Vladimir Putin’s address to the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation live. The calculation was based on all broadcasts of this event on YouTube. The majority of views come from users from Eastern Europe, including Ukraine. More than 35% of views of Vladimir Putin’s live message were received from Internet users located in Ukraine. 54% are Russian users and residents of Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporozhye and Kherson regions. Earlier, on February 25, President of Ukraine Vladimir Zelensky held a press conference “Ukraine. 2024.” The live broadcast of Vladimir Zelensky's press conference collected 21,000 views. 97% of the audience watching the event online were in territory controlled by the Ukrainian authorities.
The comparison given in the text is obviously manipulative in nature. If you believe the subtitles, then data on views of Putin’s speech was collected from all YouTube channels where the broadcast was carried out. However, for some reason they are compared with the audience of Zelensky’s press conference on just one channel, Freedom, where recording with Russian voice acting received 21,000 views (at the time of writing this analysis, the video had 22,800 views). At the same time, on YouTube you can find many other channels broadcast the same speech by the Ukrainian president, and some of these records dialed hundreds of thousands of views.
“Verified” could not find this video or any mention of a similar Social Blade study on website Wired, nor on this publication’s social networks (Facebook, X, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok). There is no video footage of viewing Putin’s speech on the resources of the British version of the magazine (website, YouTube, Instagram). At the same time, fact checkers of the project StopFake found out what was used in the video video eight years ago, in which Social Blade analyst Jena Arnold does not present the results of the study, but explains the principles of operation of the service’s tools.
On website and in social networks Social Blade has no research on how YouTube users from different countries followed Putin's address to the Federal Assembly. “Verified” contacted the company’s support service and asked to comment on the viral messages. A Social Blade representative responded that the service did not collect such statistics. “We have not made such statements, we do not track data from live broadcasts,” said the manager for working with networks and partners Marcus Stringer.
The earliest appearance of the “Verified” video was found in the pro-Russian Telegram channel “Sheikh Tamir"(173,000 views), which has already been published dozens of times caught on the distribution of fabricated photos and videos. There, a post about a study allegedly conducted by Social Blade appeared on March 1 at 12:59 Moscow time. In addition, in the channels "Shkvarka News"(2900 views) and "Shkvarka 2.0"(1500), good acquaintances to our regular readers, they wrote that this video was sent by an anonymous subscriber - it is with such notes that fake materials are often launched into the information space.
Earlier, the spread of two similar fakes began with “Sheikh Tamir”. Thus, in December 2023, the Euronews TV channel allegedly released video about a Gallup poll, according to which 75% of Ukrainian Internet users followed Putin’s Direct Line. In January 2024, the same Telegram channel reported that Politico allegedly published video about another Social Blade study, according to which interest in Zelensky on the Internet fell by 63% in 2023.
Thus, the news that Putin’s speech to the Federal Assembly was watched live on YouTube by 27 million people, a third of whom were in Ukraine, is based on non-existent research from a fake video. And although it is not known for certain how many people watched the message on YouTube, the Telegram channel “We Can Explain” noticedthat the two-hour speech did not cause a stir among Russian television viewers - according to Mediascope, in 2024, Putin’s message was watched by almost half as many people as the year before.
Cover photo: screenshot of video on the website kremlin.ru
- “We can explain.” Putin's message failed in the ratings. Over the course of a year, the Russian President’s address to the Federal Assembly began to be watched by half as many viewers
- Is it true that an Italian bar sold beer at a 50% discount in honor of Putin's address to the Federal Assembly?
- Is it true that vacancies have appeared in Ukraine for authors of negative comments on Putin’s interview with Carlson?
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