Fighting on Social Media: Militant Discourse, Networks, and Ideology

• In Event: Social Media and Violence

Abstract

Anti-government insurgent movements are frequently made up of multiple militant groups that may either cooperate or engage in conflict with each other. What explains these patterns of cooperation and conflict? Answering this question is critical for those who seek to understand modern insurgencies, including the fragmentation or consolidation of militant groups, and how these developments can affect the length and intensity of conflict. Our research shows how social media discourse can be used to construct militant networks and ideology over time. Furthermore, we use a signed network analysis that enables the investigation of cooperation and conflict in an integrated manner. We illustrate the value of this methodology by revealing how ideology can structure militant networks even for the case of a single state sponsor.

Most accounts of insurgent dynamics use materialist explanations, downplaying the role of ideology, although there are some dissenting findings that suggest ideology may matter in some cases. We seek to advance this debate by proposing a new approach to data collection, offering a novel methodological approach, and showing how broadening our theoretical lens can enhance our knowledge.

Past efforts to explain patterns of militant infighting, cooperation, and fragmentation have leaned heavily on journalistic accounts as a data source. While valuable, news sources come with some unavoidable limitations, including problems of unequal access to all militant groups involved in an insurgency and reluctance of some militants to talk to the media, problems that may lead to systematic bias. We argue that militant groups’ social media data, used to communicate with their supporters and recruit fighters, are an increasingly valuable source of information with which to understand intergroup dynamics within insurgencies. These data allow us to analyze what militants say about themselves, about each other, and about important events in the conflict, including claiming credit for attacks and describing battles.

Prior quantitative analyses of militant infighting and cooperation often (although not always) have used network analysis to account for the interdependence of the actors involved. A limitation of many previous studies, however, is that they examined either conflict ties or cooperative ties between militant fighters. We argue that signed network analysis, a relatively novel approach in political science, is an improvement on past efforts. Signed networks account for both positive and negative ties between actors, and so are clearly a valuable tool to use when seeking to understand both cooperation and conflict.

We apply our new data collection strategy and signed network analysis to studying the anti-government insurgency in eastern Ukraine, where Russia-supported militants have been fighting the Ukrainian government since 2014. Using a combination of machine learning and human annotation, we process and code statements by militants on the Russian social media platform VKontakte, which is widely used by the anti-government side. We then construct a signed network of militant cooperation and conflict. We analyze multiple aspects of network structure, including community structure, over time. In particular, we show how network structure is related to three elements of insurgent ideology: territorial aspiration, conflict framing (ingroup/outgroup divides), and ideal polity.

Interestingly, our data show that patterns of cooperation and conflict are only predicted by one of these components of insurgent ideology, territorial aspiration, about which Russia, the sponsor of these groups, was ambivalent in the early days of the conflict. Absent a clear signal from the external sponsor, militant groups staked out different positions about the desirability of fighting for a much larger portion of southeastern Ukraine than they ever controlled, and these ideological differences shaped network structure in substantively important and statistically significant ways.

Our findings show that a novel data collection strategy and a more appropriate analytical tool yield a more nuanced take on the role of ideology than frequently dominates debates between rationalist scholars and those who take ideology at face value. We suggest that future scholars of insurgent dynamics take advantage of these new data sources and analytical tools and, from a theoretical perspective, incorporate the interests and ideological positions of an insurgency’s external sponsor. We think that these steps can go a long way to explaining why ideology matters in some cases and not others.

Authors

• Calvin Garner, University of Washington

• Nora Webb Williams, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Megan Morrison, University of Washington

• Michael Gabbay, University of Washington