Division, Demonization and Disinformation in Russian Propaganda

• In Event: Poster Session: Political Communication

Abstract

The vast majority of Russians rely on state-controlled television as their primary source of information about politics and current events. This provides Putin’s regime with a potentially powerful tool through which it can influence public opinion. The content of Russian television broadcasts is typically heavily biased in favor of Russia in the international sphere and Putin’s policies both domestically and internationally. Public opinion polls suggest that many Russians believe the messages presented to them on state television, which may seem puzzling given the availability of alternative information and the knowledge that media is controlled by the state. In this paper, I examine the mechanisms by which Russian propaganda influences attitudes. I argue that a key component of Russian propaganda’s effectiveness is its use of emotionally triggering rhetoric, particularly in connection with recurrent symbols that appeal to social identities. Informational content, including “disinformation,” is often deployed in tandem with emotional and symbolic messaging. From the words, to the images to the music, much of Russian propaganda primes audiences’ anxieties about a threatening world. Literature in political psychology developed principally in the American context has shown that messaging can create particularly high levels of anxiety when it appeals to social identities that are presented as under threat. Moreover, threatening messaging can encourage people to seek and absorb available information. I apply a similar theory to the Russian context to explain audience acceptance of disinformation in Russian propaganda.
This paper first presents the results of a detailed descriptive analysis of Russian television broadcasts. I examine the prevalence of different types of emotional appeals, and how these appeals are deployed in tandem with biased, misleading or false information. I additionally develop a list of recurrent symbols in Russian propaganda, and examine their use in relation to other messaging. These symbols prime social identities, and present an in-group as threatened by a constructed out-group. I first present qualitative results with analyses of a small sample of hand-coded broadcasts. I then present results of a quantitative text analysis of a larger sample of broadcasts.
In the second part of the paper, I examine the effects of different types of propaganda on attitudes with an online experiment. In the experiment, I evaluate three hypotheses: H1) Propaganda shifts people’s attitudes such that they are more supportive of regime policies, H2) Propaganda is more effective in shifting attitudes when it primes emotions, particularly anxiety, and H3) propaganda generates more anxiety and causes greater shifts in attitudes when it appeals to specific symbols associated with social identities. I randomly assign individuals to one of four treatment conditions or a control group. In the first treatment condition, broadcasts are presented that exclude emotionally triggering content (music, violent images, words referring to emotions). In the second condition, individuals watch a similar broadcast, but they are first primed to feel anxiety. The broadcast also includes images and music. In the third condition, individuals are primed to feel anxiety, but no broadcast is shown. In the final treatment condition, the broadcast includes appeals to specific identity-based symbols. Finally, a control group sees no broadcast and is not primed to emotion. After treatment, all participants are given the opportunity to indicate whether they would be interested in receiving additional information on the topic from a set of different sources, including state television and other sources. They then complete a survey about their political attitudes and their emotional response to the content. The results of the experiment help to quantify the short-term effects of propaganda on attitudes. They additionally provide insight into the mechanisms by which propaganda achieves its effects and the importance of emotions and symbols in such messaging.

Author

• Ashley Blum, UCLA