Kremlin Tweets: The Quest for Dominance in the Russian Online Space

• In Event: Government and Opposition in Russia: Activism, Protest and Social Media

Abstract

The paper determines and explores the nuances of the Kremlin’s approach to social media use in the context of its domestic political agenda. Based on a complex methodology, applied to longitudinal data on politically relevant social media discussions, it identifies and reviews key strategic elements, including content domination and topic diffusion. The study also detects sentiment and other metrics, measuring reactions of depicted online communities on given political events.

The phenomenon of Social Media in the Russian political context resulted from the 2011-2012 post-election protests and, therefore, in many ways resembled the global trend of emergence of digital civil activism. However, unlike in many other cases, such as certain events of the Arab Spring and the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine, in Russia the opposition activities on social media did not lead to a significant political transformation in the country. Taking into account the significance of political blogging for the Russian public sphere and the relatively unconstrained development of the Internet in the country in the 2000s, the inability of social media to instigate political changes through a digitally mediated protest points at the existence of a certain and deliberate Kremlin strategy to counter such efforts.

We hypothesise that such a complex strategy includes elements of both, content domination as well as containment of unfavourable discussions, and applies various methods: from opinion leaders’ inspired topic discussions to the use of semi-automated and automated user accounts to infiltrate and diffuse certain unfavourable discussion threads. We find evidence that the pro-government political forces have been able to establish a significant presence in the virtual sphere, effectively hampering the domination of political opposition in these platforms. We also determine three key elements of the Kremlin’s social media domination strategy: (1) creating and populating pro-government content, and ensuring its visibility throughout the network, (2) mobilizing supporters for active discussions, and (3) interfering with valuable and potentially powerful anti-government discussion threads, using multiple tactics: from relatively sophisticated discreditation of the messages and their key advocates, to more straightforward disruptive tactics of content diffusion with multiple meaningless comments.

There have been some, but fragmented studies that indirectly speak in favour of the proposed hypothesis. However, they either investigated the characteristics of social media platforms, such as the impact of ownership, or focused on the analysis of the state’s expanded regulation of the digital sphere. Fewer studies turned to the contents of the online discussions, yet they did not conceptualize their findings to determine a certain deliberate strategy.

We propose the paper to fill this gap and discuss the entire nomenclature of tools and methods, used by the Kremlin in the virtual political context. We argue that despite the recently imposed legislative and regulatory restrictions on Internet use in Russia, the key component of the Kremlin’s digital information policy remains control by means of agenda setting, content domination and active participation in online political discussions that cannot be reduced to the rise of simple forbidding and discriminatory mechanisms.


The proposed research hypothesis is tested on the basis of a large array of Twitter data harvested over the last three years using the platform’s API. The data are collected during highly resonant domestic and international political events, including the most recent 2016-2017 mass protests, 2016 State Duma and 2018 Presidential elections, thus providing a valid source for politically relevant online public discussions. We first apply methods of Social Network Analysis to detect existing online political communities, review their persistence and stability over time as well as discover their internal structure, density and the degree of interconnectedness with other communities. We also determine the role of traditional opinion leaders and depict actual group influencers, using our own methodology. In addition, we evaluate the impact of automated accounts (bots) on actual political discussions by identifying them in the network, measuring their interconnectedness with human accounts, and their ability to influence ongoing discussions.

We further utilize opinion mining methods to evaluate the relative impact of selected discussions and the ability of leaders and influencers to seed certain topics and disseminate determined content. Finally, we apply NLP-based methods of sentiment analysis to establish correlation between topics and their resonance within their own and the opposing communities.

The resultant study will provide a holistic picture of the Kremlin’s social media strategy, including the discussion of its key elements, and evaluation of its efficiency.

Authors

• Mikhail Zherebtsov, Carleton University

• Serge Goussev, Carleton University