How Belarus's Ministry of Internal Affairs Turned Facebook Into a Wanted Persons Network
The Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Belarus, working with Belarusian ad agency TDI Group, launched People You May Know in April 2017 — a digital government campaign that repurposed Facebook's friend-recommendation algorithm to surface the identities of wanted criminals to members of the Belarusian public, reaching more than 2 million people without paid media.
The campaign originated from a specific institutional problem. In Belarus, approximately 5,000 criminals remained unpunished at the time of launch, according to Clapboard's campaign documentation. Traditional identikits — composite facial sketches distributed through official channels — were proving difficult for ordinary citizens to notice or retain. The Ministry needed a mechanism that could place criminal likenesses directly in front of people who might recognise them, using a medium those people already trusted and checked daily.
TDI Group's solution was structurally elegant. The agency created six trial Facebook accounts populated with information drawn from official records on wanted individuals. Because Facebook's People You May Know feature surfaces profile suggestions based on shared contacts, geographic proximity, and overlapping personal data, these accounts began appearing organically in the recommendation feeds of users across Belarus who had genuine social connections to the wanted persons. The platform's own infrastructure became the distribution engine. No paid placement was required; the algorithm performed the investigative legwork.
The campaign produced a documented law-enforcement outcome. Vitaliy Shukan, one of the individuals whose profile had been created as part of the initiative, was apprehended several months after the project launched, as reported by Clapboard and corroborated by Ads of the World. Following that result, the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Belarus formally adopted the People You May Know model as an ongoing criminal search tool, extending the campaign's life well beyond its April 2017 debut. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 78 out of 100.
TDI Group identified a structural gap between state communication and public attention in Belarus. Government-issued wanted notices and identikit posters occupy physical spaces — police stations, municipal boards, transit hubs — that citizens pass without engaging. Facebook, by contrast, is a space where Belarusian users were already pausing, scrolling, and making recognition judgements about faces dozens of times each day. Moving the criminal search function into that attentional environment was the core strategic insight.
The choice of Facebook's People You May Know feature was not incidental. The algorithm surfaces suggestions based on mutual contacts, shared workplaces, hometown data, and device-location overlap. For wanted individuals who have real social histories — former colleagues, family members, neighbours — their digital footprints create a network of shared data points that the algorithm can trace. By seeding accounts with accurate personal information about the wanted persons, TDI Group ensured that those accounts would propagate to exactly the people most likely to recognise them: people from the same community.
The broader Belarusian advertising market in 2017 provides useful context. Internet advertising in Belarus reached approximately 27 million US dollars in 2017, growing 30 percent year on year, according to research published by Rep Bntu By. Internet advertising represented between 27 and 31 percent of the total Belarusian advertising market that year, per estimates from rep.bntu.by and Nmn Media, underscoring how rapidly digital channels were becoming primary communication environments in the country. The People You May Know campaign operated against that backdrop, deploying digital logic for a public-safety objective at a moment when Belarusian audiences were shifting decisively toward online platforms.
In the government communications category, comparable criminal-search initiatives in neighbouring markets — including campaigns by interior ministries in Russia and Ukraine that relied on television broadcast and print wanted notices — depended on paid media budgets and passive audience exposure. The Belarus campaign inverted that model entirely, using earned algorithmic distribution to achieve a scale that paid placements in a market of Belarus's size would struggle to match.
The creative execution of People You May Know is defined by deliberate concealment of its own authorship. TDI Group constructed six Facebook profiles that were indistinguishable, at first glance, from ordinary user accounts. Each profile was built using genuine information sourced from Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Belarus records on specific wanted individuals — names, biographical details, and photographic likenesses accurate enough to trigger recognition from people who knew those individuals in real life.
The creative discipline required was one of restraint rather than elaboration. Conventional government public-safety campaigns announce their institutional origin through logos, hotline numbers, official typography, and declarative calls to action. This campaign stripped all of that away. The six accounts carried no visible Ministry branding. Their persuasive mechanism was not a message but a face appearing in a familiar interface at a moment of social browsing. Recognition, if it occurred, would feel spontaneous — more like a discovery than a government communication.
Production credits for People You May Know as documented on Ads of the World identify the campaign as the work of TDI Group, with Anna Tishkevich and Alex Litovka named as key creatives on the project. The campaign's sole media asset — consistent with a digital execution built around platform-native profiles rather than produced video or display creative — reflects the strategic choice to let Facebook's own visual language carry the work. The interface itself was the advertisement.
Ethically, the execution raised questions that the campaign's results did not fully resolve. Creating fictional social media personas using real individuals' likenesses — even wanted criminals — involves platform terms of service considerations and civil liberties dimensions that public commentary noted at the time, as reported by thebtw.com. The Ministry's formal adoption of the mechanism as an ongoing criminal search tool suggests those questions were resolved in favour of operational effectiveness within the Belarusian institutional context.
No independently audited performance data for the People You May Know campaign is publicly available beyond the figures reported in Clapboard's campaign documentation and corroborated by Ads of the World. On the basis of those sources, the campaign reached more than 2 million people through Facebook's organic recommendation system, a figure that represents substantial penetration for a country of Belarus's population size without any documented paid media expenditure.
The single most consequential result is the confirmed apprehension of Vitaliy Shukan within several months of the campaign's April 2017 launch, as reported by Clapboard and Ads of the World. In the context of government advertising, a direct law-enforcement outcome of that kind is an unusually concrete measure of effectiveness. Most public-safety campaigns are evaluated on awareness metrics or reported behavioural intent; this one produced an arrest.
The Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Belarus subsequently formalised the approach as a standing criminal search tool, which constitutes institutional validation of the model. Adoption at policy level — rather than a one-cycle campaign award — suggests the Ministry assessed the cost-to-outcome ratio as favourable relative to conventional wanted-notice mechanisms operating in Belarus at the time.
Structurally, the campaign's effectiveness rested on three compounding factors: the algorithm's intrinsic targeting precision, the social credibility of a peer-style profile recommendation, and the zero-cost distribution model. Each factor amplified the others. A traditional wanted poster achieves reach through volume of physical placement; People You May Know achieved reach through relational relevance, surfacing the right face to the right person because the platform's data architecture made that connection inevitable.
People You May Know was a 2017 digital government campaign created by TDI Group for the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Belarus. Six Facebook accounts were built using information about wanted criminals, allowing Facebook's own recommendation algorithm to surface those profiles to people who might recognise them, reaching more than 2 million users organically, according to Clapboard.
TDI Group created six Facebook profiles populated with real biographical data on wanted individuals. Facebook's People You May Know feature then distributed those profiles to users sharing mutual contacts, locations, or institutional connections with the wanted persons — placing criminal likenesses directly in front of people most likely to recognise them, with no paid media required.
Vitaliy Shukan was apprehended within months of the April 2017 campaign launch, as reported by Clapboard and Ads of the World. His capture is the documented law-enforcement outcome directly associated with the campaign. The Ministry of Internal Affairs subsequently adopted the Facebook account mechanism as a formal ongoing criminal search tool across Belarus.
Anna Tishkevich and Alex Litovka are identified as key creatives on the People You May Know campaign at TDI Group, as documented by Ads of the World. The agency, based in Belarus, developed the campaign for the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Belarus and launched it in April 2017 as a digital-first public-safety initiative.
The Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Belarus formalised People You May Know as a standing criminal search tool after the campaign produced a confirmed arrest and reached more than 2 million people at no paid-media cost, according to Clapboard. The algorithm-driven distribution model proved more precise than conventional identikit posters, which Belarus authorities found difficult for citizens to notice.
Unlike traditional government wanted notices — which rely on passive physical placement in police stations or transit hubs — People You May Know embedded criminal likenesses inside Facebook's social recommendation interface. The platform's relational algorithm ensured profiles reached users with genuine connections to the wanted individuals, making recognition far more likely than broadcast or print alternatives operating in Belarus at the time.
.webp)
Creative Collaboration Platform: The Backbone of Modern Creative WorkWhat is a creative collaboration platform?Clapboard defines a creative collaboration platform as the operational core for today’s distributed creative teams. This is not a collection of digital collaboration tools stitched together; Clapboard’s system
Understanding the Creative Production MarketplaceWhat is a Creative Production Marketplace?Clapboard defines a creative production marketplace as a structured ecosystem where brands, agencies, and production talent converge to execute video, advertising, and branded content at scale. Unlike the legacy agency or freelanREAD FULL ARTICLE
The Urgent Need for a Creative Production Operating SystemWhy Traditional Creative Production Models Break DownClapboard sees the creative production landscape shifting under pressure. Content velocity is no longer a buzzword—it’s a mandate. Modern advertising demands relentless output across dozens of channels, each wREAD FULL ARTICLE
