Russian Social Media Research Articles

Disinformation against Crimean Tatars in Russian Social Media

This article examines the persistence of Tatarophobia against Crimean Tatars in the Russian segment of social media during the first year of the full-scale invasion (24 February 2022–24 February 2023). A total of 4,435 posts from various social media platforms, including Facebook, Odnoklassniki, Telegram, Twitter, and Vkontakte, were analysed. The discourse predominantly echoes Russia’s imperial and Soviet-era narratives, along with xenophobic and oppressive rhetoric exacerbated by the full-fledged invasion. The propaganda seeks to cultivate a negative perception of Crimean Tatars as an ethnic community, manipulating cultural and historical aspects related to them. Additionally, it endeavours to construct an adversarial image of relations between Ukraine and the Crimean Tatars, as well as of Ukraine’s current policies. Russian special services perceive the capacity of Crimean Tatars to self-organize, establish volunteer units, or organize blockades as a threat. The propaganda effort not only fosters harassment and hate speech but also encourages peninsula residents to view them as “unreliable elements” deserving of suppression.

GreenRu: A Russian Dataset for Detecting Mentions of Green Practices in Social Media Posts

Green practices are social practices that aim to harmonize the relations between people and the natural environment. They may involve minimizing the use of resources and the generation of waste and emissions. Detecting green practices in social media posts helps to understand which green practices are currently common and to develop recommendations on the scaling of green practices to reduce environmental problems. This paper describes GreenRu, a novel Russian social media dataset for detecting the mentions of green practices related to waste management. It has a sentence-level markup and consists of 1326 posts collected in Russian online communities. The total number of mentions of green waste practices is 3765. The paper assessed the effectiveness of the multi-label and one-versus-rest BERT-based models for detecting the mentions of green practices in social media posts and compared several data augmentation methods in terms of both classification metrics and human evaluation. To augment the dataset, a backtranslation method and generative language models, such as RuGPT, RuT5, and ChatGPT, were used in this study. The results enable researchers to monitor the green waste practices on social networks and develop environmental policies. Additionally, GreenRu can support machine learning models to analyze social media content, assess the prevalence and effectiveness of green waste practices, and identify ways to expand them.

Impact of medical bloggers’ activities on the prevention of disease risk, public, population and individual health: the opinion of social media users

Due to the high information and communication importance and potential of the medical blogosphere in the formation of health literacy of the population, there is the increased need to study the opinions of Russian social media users on the impact of the content of medical blogs on personal and public health. Aim of the study was to find out the opinion of social media users on the extent to which the activities of bloggers specializing in public health and health care topics influence the prevention of major non-communicable and infectious diseases, public and personal health, within the changing boundaries of medical knowledge broadcasting (using sociological methods). Material and methods. The authors conducted a quantitative sociological survey of 178 respondents - users of social media: 55 (30.9 %) women and 123 (69.1 %) men about visiting blogs specializing in public health and healthcare. The collection of information was carried out by e-mailing a questionnaire developed by the authors, and analyzed the answers to questions from active blog users through a Google form in April – May 2023. Results. The study results of the impact of bloggers’ activities on personal and public health, including those related to the quality of medical information disseminated in social media, are described. Respondents believe that medical bloggers have a greater impact on public health than personal health. At the same time, according to the respondents, the spheres of influence in the field of public health do not coincide with the spheres of influence in the field of personal health. Thus, 74.7 % of respondents believe that medical bloggers have an impact on maintaining a healthy lifestyle of the population, prevention (61.8 % of all respondents think so) and treatment of infectious diseases (61.2 %). The requirements for the quality of information provided by bloggers are considered. Based on the analysis of Russian and foreign scientific literature, the authors developed a graphical diagram of the effect of dissemination through the blogosphere of information in the field of health care and disease prevention. Conclusions. The content published on medical blogs affects the health literacy of the population. That is why, medical blogs can be seen as a social determinant of health, because health blogs can be the key to the success of disease prevention and control efforts for public health maintaining. For organizing a communication intervention of medical personnel in social media to inform the population about methods for preventing the risk of developing major non-communicable and infectious diseases and increasing the level of health literacy of the population, medical blogs can and should be used to inform and educate patients as part of general or targeted multimodal educational practices or as a means of delivering electronic content. The risks of publishing inaccurate information in the blogosphere must be considered, whereby patients can easily become misinformed, which can have serious consequences for their health, and even increase their risk of mortality. To make the best use of the blogosphere, it is necessary to solve the problems of content accuracy and increase the level of professionalism of bloggers who write on medical topics. They need to be professionally trained to work for health, contributing to the prevention of the risk of developing major non-communicable and communicable diseases, improving the health of the population through education, and raising the level of health literacy. It makes sense to assess the success of the communicative intervention of doctors in social media and their management of the training of medical bloggers as a personnel determinant of public health, since it will depend on the personnel potential of the healthcare sector.

Unveiling the War and Constructing Identities: Exploring Memes in Ukrainian and Russian Social Media during the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

The article examines the generation and deployment of visual narratives in Ukrainian and Russian digital participatory cultures, with a specific focus on internet memes in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It analyzes the form, content, and functions of these memes and highlights their similarity in mobilizing and conveying political messages despite variations in their visual components. The study indicates that Ukrainian memes are used not only to promote political agendas but also serve as trauma coping and collective identity construction mechanisms in times of crisis, helping to promote new war narratives that are engaged in the construction of the self and the other.

СТИЛИСТИЧЕСКИЕ ОСОБЕННОСТИ ЗАГОЛОВКОВ РОССИЙСКОЙ ПРЕССЫ

The proposed article describes the functional and pragmatic opportunities of the structural elements of the Russian social media with an emphasis on their stylistic characteristics. The range of issues selected for highlighting consists of an analysis of the basic lexical and syntactic agents involved not only in the heading complex, but also in the general content. In the process of studying the designated question, it is proved that the main purpose of paths and figures of speech in the media is to convey the hidden self-proposition of a journalist, influence the reader and cause an emotional response to him. Headings with expression techniques reflect the author’s position better, thus affects the world view of the reader, his attitude to the describing events. It make the recipient rethink some shades of information and covert meanings. Therefore, they attract the recipient into internal discussion rather faster, they force him to analyze the situation and subsequently set the direction of actions.

Learning, Performance, Fatigue and Regret: Tales of Motherhood on Russian Social Media in the 2010s–2020s

The essay examines changes in the conceptualisation and practice of motherhood in Russia from the 1990s up to the 2020s. From the 1990s, a mother’s obligations towards a child rose sharply in comparison to the Soviet era. Motherhood has become individualised and isolating, while expectations of maternal work have intensified. In the relatively affluent 2000s, a Western model of ‘intensive mothering’ became popular among women who could afford not to work, but this dropped out of favour in the more straitened 2010s, as women were forced to return to work. However, by this point, right-wing ideologists were promoting ‘traditional values’, according to which women’s role was primarily caring for others. This research demonstrates, drawing on a special interest motherhood group, #Shchastyematerinstva, on the Russian social media website VKontakte, that motherhood is now, for many Russian women, a heavy and unwelcome burden.

Low Civility and High Incivility in Russian Online Deliberation

One of the most studied fields in deliberative research is (in)civility in Internet-based political discussions on issues of common concern. Uncivil behaviour demonstrated by participants in online communication has various forms and negative effects on the process and outcomes of e-deliberation as well as on deliberators’ reactions and attitudes, which have been predominantly investigated in Western democracies. However, this issue has been poorly covered in the countries with less stable democratic traditions and values. This paper explores speech culture with a focus on civility and incivility in Russian political conversations conducted on Russian social media. The authors analyse mass-scale web political discussions on a polarising issue of the court sentence of the politician Alexei Navalny (2021), taking one of the most popular Russian social networks VKontakte. For this study, scholars use discourse analysis based on the works on deliberative democracy proposed by J. Habermas (1996). They conclude that Russian political speech regarding Navalny’s sentence and conducted on the VKontakte social media platform can be characterised by a great extent of uncivil speech unbalanced by a low extent of civil speech. The conversations are not oriented towards mutual recognition or reaching a consensus, as participants are often distracted from the main issue being discussed, and turn to interpersonal topics instead.

Spreading Lies Through the Cyber Domain

The expansion of Information Operations (IO) over the past ten years has allowed individuals and groups to increase their sphere of influence on a global scale. Nation-state cyber threat actors have increased their presence on social media, building out false personas to influence large populations. This type of activity is difficult to stop due to the availability of social networks on the internet and the ease of creating false personas that can’t be directly attributed to the actor. IO activity has been observed with the Russian cyber activity during the 2016 U.S. Presidential elections and from Russian social media campaigns provoking extremist groups and attempting to cause physical harm, such as the 2017 campaign on Facebook to start a rally and a simultaneous counter rally in front of the Islamic Da’wah Centre of Houston. Although Russia has been observed leveraging this capability, they are not the only global actor in the cyber domain taking advantage of IO. Global threat actors have leveraged social media platforms and blogs to influence the global population and spread propaganda. This type of activity has been seen within traditional warfare using propaganda techniques. With the introduction of the cyber domain into warfare, there is an increased ability to communicate not only to one population but to the global community with the intent to manipulate the masses using IO. This paper examines the Cybersecurity Operations (CO) that have been observed utilizing IO and the psychological impacts they have had in successful campaigns against the United States. This paper argues that with increased influence capabilities in the cyber domain, individuals and groups will continue using IO to support tactical and strategic objectives. Through the available literature, this paper examines the impacts that IO has had on the United States through attempts to manipulate elections and create divides in the nation over the last ten years. This paper leverages the psychology of group processes to analyze the literature involving social media campaigns and the influencing of groups through the lens of social identity theory to provide new insight into mitigating and countering IO.

Медиаобраз СССР в измерении хештег-динамики: контекст российских реалий

The article analyzes the processes of constructing the media image of the USSR in the space of the social network «VKontakte». The Soviet Union, being the central political institution of the twentieth century, has left a huge legacy in the public memory and for the modern man. In today's digital society, the central topos of storing this kind of memory is social media, dictating new rules for the informational agendas of reality. The main methodological solution for this study is to turn to the analysis of the hashtag «#nazadvssr», which contains an element of social nostalgia and collective memory of the Soviet period. By analyzing the statistical graph, as well as using the socio-philosophical interpretation of the current hashtag, the authors derive a conceptual picture of the vision of the Soviet past through the eyes of contemporary Russian social media users.

Predicting perceived ethnicity with data on personal names in Russia

In this paper, we develop a machine learning classifier that predicts perceived ethnicity from data on personal names for major ethnic groups populating Russia. We collect data from VK, the largest Russian social media website. Ethnicity was coded from languages spoken by users and their geographical location, with the data manually cleaned by crowd workers. The classifier shows the accuracy of 0.82 for a scheme with 24 ethnic groups and 0.92 for 15 aggregated ethnic groups. It can be used for research on ethnicity and ethnic relations in Russia, with the data sets that have personal names but not ethnicity.

What’s In A Russian English Username? A Case Study of Social Media Accounts Names

The present paper examines social media account usernames of Russian speakers of English. It aims to classify over a hundred Russian English usernames (collected between 2016–2021) in terms of their structure, typical linguistic features as well as translingual and transcultural patterns that underpin their creation. This paper argues that Russian speakers of English consciously and / or subconsciously creating their usernames employ a number of translingual and transcultural strategies and practices that are aimed at retaining and transmitting Russian linguacultural identity within such global multicultural English-dominated domain as international social media. Apart from signalling Russian identity of their owners, the analyzed usernames demonstrate that Russian social media users being bilingual en masse (at least, at a graphic level), do draw on Russian English for communication within the landscape of this social media thus facilitating further formation of the social media Russian English.

Language aggression in virtual professional communities

The study focuses on language aggression as it is enacted in virtual professional communities. With the aim to reveal the dominant forms and mechanisms of aggression in the virtual environment, the authors explore data retrieved from Russian social media. Theoretically, the paper is informed by social identity theory and linguistic pragmatics. Adopting a methodology that draws on an inferential model of communication, the study analyses aggressive utterances and their meanings in situational contexts. The findings distinguish between two principal forms of aggression: insulting aggression and aggression of exclusion. Although both perform the function of social control, they differ in terms of triggering situations, pragmatic mechanisms as well as linguistic resources employed. Insulting aggression makes use of dehumanising, negative evaluation, blaming, social deixis, ‘reductio ad absurdum’ and references to one’s emotional involvement in the situation of conflict. Such mechanisms are enacted through the linguistic tools that convey the semantics of aggression more or less directly. These include pejoratives, depreciative epithets, colloquialisms, informal expressions, lexemes with semantics of emotional state, imperatives, means of deontic modality and a shift in using polite/impolite forms of address. On the contrary, aggression of exclusion involves meanings that require inferential efforts of the recipient. The interplay between literal meanings of speech acts and the underlying intentions results in conversational implicatures. Exclusion is manifested through drawing a boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them’, terminating a conversation, talking about somebody present in the third person. Its linguistic forms comprise lexemes with semantics of exclusion, lexis with negative connotation, interjections, and irony.

Of supranodes and socialwashing: network theory and the responsible innovation of social media platforms

Social media networks are expanding rapidly, increasing the spread and scale of information diffusion. Researchers have highlighted distinguishing features of social media network platforms: network structure transparency, public self-monitored digital profiles, homogenized network connections, and node-created digital content. These features, while adding utility to social media platform providers and users, can also be exploited to manipulate users’ behavior and overall network outcomes. This paper posits the importance of network theory as critical foundational “laws” upon which the responsible innovation of social media can be built to minimize such manipulation, how such theory can be used to predict the potential impacts of new network innovations, and the resulting difficulty this framing suggests for self-governance on the part of platform providers. Through a case study analysis of Russian social media interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the value of a network theoretic lens is highlighted. The concept of “supranodes”, social media nodes empowered via theoretical knowledge and network awareness to socially engineer network structures and outcomes, is developed and the network theoretic features they exploit discussed.

Perception by Russian Social Media Users of Mass Protests During the Attempted Coup in Kazakhstan

The article presents the results of an applied political research on the representation of the 2022 Kazakh events in the Russian segment of social media. The context of the study stems from the significant intersection of the Russian and Kazakh segments of social media and the mutual influence of political processes. Under the political mobilization of the mass protests in Kazakhstan, which turned into an attempted coup, the activities of Russian counterelites intensified in various regions of Russia. Using a hybrid research strategy combined with cognitive mapping and social media analysis the authors managed to identify dynamic, structural and substantive characteristics of the information representation of the Kazakh events in the Russian segment of the Internet. The authors concluded that the scale of the Kazakh protests allowed to draw the short-term interest of the Russian audience, mainly from the regions bordering Kazakhstan. The use of economic triggers (rising prices, inefficient social policy, etc.) led to the involvement of the adult audience in the discussions around the Kazakh events, while a significant part of youth and young adults was excluded from information flows around the events. The study revealed that the Russian opposition attempted to use manipulative “contamination” technology in order to extrapolate the political and economic discontent in Kazakhstan to the situation in Russia. At the same time, the greatest resonance in the Russian segment of users was caused directly by the participation of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) in the settlement, and not by the social and economic triggers that led to the events.

Fighting Propaganda with Censorship: A Study of the Ukrainian Ban on Russian Social Media

Many states have become concerned with Russian cyberattacks and online propaganda. The Ukrainian government responded to the information threat in 2017 by blocking access to several Russian websites, including VKontakte, one of the most popular social media websites in Ukraine. By exploiting a natural experiment in Ukraine, I find that the sudden censorship policy reduced activity on VKontakte, despite the fact that a vast majority of the users were legally and technically able to bypass the ban. Users with strong political and social affiliations to Russia were at least as likely to be affected by the ban as those with weak affiliations. I argue that the ease of access to online media—not political attitudes toward the state—was the main mechanism behind the users’ response to the ban. These findings suggest that this pragmatic view on the effects of censorship holds, even in the highly politicized military conflict between Russia and Ukraine, which later evolved into a full-scale Russian invasion.

Conflict Mobilization in Russian Social Media Communities As an Actual Practice of Protest Communication: Collective and Personal Dimension

From the standpoint of communicative approach conflict mobilization is considered in the article as an actual practice of protest communication in modern Russia. The parameters of the collective-personal dimension of conflict mobilization in the most popular social networks among Russian users: VKontakte, Odnoklassniki, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook are presented. Major forms of social group members online participation in protest actions, interaction means of conflict mobilization communities and the formation of Internet solidarity have been characterized with such criteria as publication volume and frequency. Selective factual and emotional-psychological argumentation with elements of defamation of opponents is concluded to prevail in the communicative behavior of the addresser. Frequent implementation of phatic strategy through consolidating appeals to community members with elements of idealization and glorification of protest actors is revealed. The addresser's self-presentation strategy is noted to be applied rather rarely; it is actualized mainly through their identification with the collective position of the group and the mass addressee. It has been established that the addressee is characterized by active self-presentation through the presentation of a subjective position opposed to a mutual opponent, is distinguished by an appeal to ethical and emotional argumentation, a variety of phatic tactics. The article reveals the relevant language means of implementing the identified strategies, shows the features of the text structure of mobilization posts.

A Pipeline for Graph-Based Monitoring of the Changes in the Information Space of Russian Social Media during the Lockdown

With the COVID-19 outbreak and the subsequent lockdown, social media became a vital communication tool. The sudden outburst of online activity influenced information spread and consumption patterns. It increases the relevance of studying the dynamics of social networks and developing data processing pipelines that allow a comprehensive analysis of social media data in the temporal dimension. This paper scopes the weekly dynamics of the information space represented by Russian social media (Twitter and LiveJournal) during a critical period (massive COVID-19 outbreak and first governmental measures). The approach is twofold: 1) build the time series of topic similarity indicators by identifying COVID-related topics in each week and measuring user contribution to the topic space, and 2) cluster user activity and display user-topic relationships on graphs in a dashboard application. The paper describes the development of the pipeline, explains the choices made and provides a case study of the adaptation to virus control measures. The results confirm that social processes and behavior in response to pandemic-triggered changes can be successfully traced in social media. Moreover, the adaptation trends revealed by psychological and sociological studies are reflected in our data and can be explored using the proposed method.

Detecting ethnicity-targeted hate speech in Russian social media texts

Ethnicity-targeted hate speech has been widely shown to influence on-the-ground inter-ethnic conflict and violence, especially in such multi-ethnic societies as Russia. Therefore, ethnicity-targeted hate speech detection in user texts is becoming an important task. However, it faces a number of unresolved problems: difficulties of reliable mark-up, informal and indirect ways of expressing negativity in user texts (such as irony, false generalization and attribution of unfavored actions to targeted groups), users’ inclination to express opposite attitudes to different ethnic groups in the same text and, finally, lack of research on languages other than English. In this work we address several of these problems in the task of ethnicity-targeted hate speech detection in Russian-language social media texts. This approach allows us to differentiate between attitudes towards different ethnic groups mentioned in the same text – a task that has never been addressed before. We use a dataset of over 2,6M user messages mentioning ethnic groups to construct a representative sample of 12K instances (ethnic group, text) that are further thoroughly annotated via a special procedure. In contrast to many previous collections that usually comprise extreme cases of toxic speech, representativity of our sample secures a realistic and, therefore, much higher proportion of subtle negativity which additionally complicates its automatic detection. We then experiment with four types of machine learning models, from traditional classifiers such as SVM to deep learning approaches, notably the recently introduced BERT architecture, and interpret their predictions in terms of various linguistic phenomena. In addition to hate speech detection with a text-level two-class approach (hate, no hate), we also justify and implement a unique instance-based three-class approach (positive, neutral, negative attitude, the latter implying hate speech). Our best results are achieved by using fine-tuned and pre-trained RuBERT combined with linguistic features, with F1-hate=0.760, F1-macro=0.833 on the text-level two-class problem comparable to previous studies, and F1-hate=0.813, F1-macro=0.824 on our unique instance-based three-class hate speech detection task. Finally, we perform error analysis, and it reveals that further improvement could be achieved by accounting for complex and creative language issues more accurately, i.e., by detecting irony and unconventional forms of obscene lexicon.

Promoting Public Awareness of Carbon Capture and Storage Technologies in the Russian Federation: A System of Educational Activities

The latest technologies for climate change mitigation are carbon capture and storage (CCS). Some countries are developing CCS projects, and they are currently at different stages of deployment. Despite the signing of international agreements on climate change mitigation, Russia’s efforts to develop and implement CCS technologies are quite limited. Therefore, it is vital that people are aware of the importance of carbon dioxide capture, utilization, and storage. The purpose of this article is to produce guidelines and toolkits to form a system of measures aimed at raising awareness of the Russian society on carbon dioxide capture and storage technologies. The paper discusses the key findings of several recent studies on the topic, e.g., a study focusing on the level of environmental consciousness among St. Petersburg students; a content analysis of the Russian school textbooks; a study of environmental groups in Russian social media; and an experimental study on creating eco-comics and posters as educational tools for promoting environmental awareness. A multi-level system of educational activities is proposed, including events for preschoolers, schoolchildren, students, and adults.

Social media infrastructure of the Russians civic participation: the analysis of audience intersection graphs for socio-political communities on Runet

The article presents the results of the analysis of the digital infrastructure of civil and political participation of Russians, it shows the connections between the audiences of online network communities, reflecting markers of the attitude of Russian social media users to the current government and indicators of the involvement of Russian citizens in the implementation of social initiatives. To construct graphs, we used a tool for unloading information and modeling the infrastructure of social connections of graphs, created on the basis of the programming language R. Additionally, the vkR packages were used to unload information from the VKontakte social network, as well as the igraph and ggraph packages for working with graphs and arcdiagram for visualisation. To interpret the empirical data, the principles of the network approach and the methodology of smart search for digital markers of socio-political processes were applied. As a result of the study, indicators of the density of communications between digital groups of political and civil participation were revealed, and the intersection of their audiences was established. Segments of the infrastructure of connections are shown both for all socio-media communities (research cases) and for each block of communities classified on two grounds: orientation (loyal or critically oriented towards the authorities) and type of group (political or civil). The intersection of audiences of loyalist and oppositional online communities was revealed and reflected in the graphs. The disunity and distance between loyalist, conventional audiences of groups carrying out political communication from civil groups, who are also constructively disposed towards the authorities, are shown. Revealed and graphically interpreted the techniques of capturing the user audience in the activities of opposition online leaders. Risks of a low density of connections between audiences of loyal social media communities have been substantiated. A relatively high density of connections has been established between opposition political online groups aimed at forming unconventional, deconsolidating attitudes of Russian social media users. Basic measures have been formulated to overcome the danger of consolidating supporters of opposition digital groups and the risks of increasing the influence of critical online leaders among the loyalist audience.