BNC Military Commissions - Main News On Yandex

News aggregator Yandex has made the news on establishing of military commissions of the Belarusian National Congress the headline news of the policy section.

Yandex made the fake news about establishment of a Right sector in Belarus the headline news of the policy section.

According to the search engine workers, a news picture of the day is formed "without human intervention". And all that the user sees on the news feed on his page is "the result of the work of the algorithms."

In theory, the robot calculates the "weight" of a message basing on three criteria: number of its quoting in other sources, information content and recency. According to Yandex, information should be "current, complete and accurate", belaruspartisan.org writes.

As for the news about the alleged establishment of Right Sector in Belarus, the robot has clearly screwed up.

Firstly, the site, where the news about the establishment of the "Right Sector" has originally appeared, has nothing to do with Belarus. The news contains a link to "Kolokol Rossii" (The Bell of Russia), which is a national-chauvinistic web resource with loud headlines like " Putin's Successor To Join Russia To California". "Kolokol", in turn, refers to the website "Russkaya Vesna" ("Russian Spring") – a propaganda resource of the so-called "New Russia".

In Belarus, only one web resource – NewsBel reposted the news.

The news called "Regional Military Commissions", which the Belarusian National Congress decided to establish and about which the leader of the Belarusian opposition Mikalai Statkevich wrote, the "Right sector". The aim of these Commissions is to carry out activities on military-patriotic education in order to prepare Belarusian citizens to fulfill their duty to protect the independence of Belarus, analysis of moods of soldiers and their readiness to defend the country from any aggression, as well as providing assistance to state bodies in confronting the aggression in case of such.

According to the data of December 2015 (there's no later data), attendance of Yandex.News in Belarus amounted to more than 600 thousand people per month. This does not include visits from mobile devices, as well as those customers who just see top headlines when they use a web browser, e-mail and other Yandex services.