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PONARS Eurasia
PONARS Eurasia
  • About
    • Contact
    • Membership
      • All Members
      • Core Members
      • Collegium Members
      • Associate Members
      • About Membership
    • Ukraine Experts
    • Executive Committee
  • Policy Memos
    • List of Policy Memos
    • Submissions
  • Podcasts
  • Online Academy
  • Events
    • Past Events
  • Recommended
  • Ukraine Experts
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RECOMMENDED
  • The Determinants of Assistance to Ukrainian and Syrian Refugees | New Voices on Eurasia with Volha Charnysh (Feb. 16)

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RSS PONARS Eurasia Podcast
  • The Putin-Xi Summit: What's New In Their Joint Communique ? February 23, 2022
    In this week’s PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman speaks with Russian China experts Vita Spivak and Alexander Gabuev about the February meeting between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, and what it may tell us about where the Russian-Chinese relationship is headed.
  • Exploring the Russian Courts' Ruling to Liquidate the Memorial Society January 28, 2022
    In this week’s PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with scholars Kelly Smith and Benjamin Nathans about the history, achievements, and impending shutdown of the Memorial Society, Russia's oldest and most venerable civic organization, and what its imminent liquidation portends for the Russian civil society.
  • Russia's 2021 census and the Kremlin's nationalities policy [Lipman Series 2021] December 9, 2021
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  • Active citizens of any kind are under threat [Lipman Series 2021] November 5, 2021
    In this week’s PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with Alexander Verkhovsky about the Kremlin's ever expanding toolkit against political and civic activists, journalists, and other dissidents.
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  • Why Is the Kremlin Nervous? [Lipman Series 2021] September 14, 2021
    In this week’s PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with Ben Noble and Nikolay Petrov about Russia’s September 17-19 legislative elections, repressive measures against electoral challengers, and whether to expect anything other than preordained results.
  • Vaccine Hesitancy in Russia, France, and the United States [Lipman Series 2021] August 31, 2021
    In this week's PONARS Eurasia Podcast episode, Maria Lipman chats with Denis Volkov, Naira Davlashyan, and Peter Slevin about why COVID-19 vaccination rates are still so low across the globe, comparing vaccine hesitant constituencies across Russia, France, and the United States.  
  • Is Russia Becoming More Soviet? [Lipman Series 2021] July 26, 2021
      In a new PONARS Eurasia Podcast episode, Maria Lipman chats with Maxim Trudolyubov about the current tightening of the Russian political sphere, asking whether or not it’s helpful to draw comparisons to the late Soviet period.
  • The Evolution of Russia's Political Regime [Lipman Series 2021] June 21, 2021
    In this week's episode of the PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with Grigory Golosov and Henry Hale about the evolution of Russia's political regime, and what to expect in the lead-up to September's Duma elections.
  • Volodymyr Zelensky: Year Two [Lipman Series 2021] May 24, 2021
    In this week's episode of the PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with Sergiy Kudelia and Georgiy Kasianov about Ukrainian President Zelensky's second year in office, and how he has handled the political turbulence of the past year.
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Putin Fans or Kremlin Bots? War and Mobilization Across Russian Social Media Platforms

  • November 10, 2022
  • Maxim Alyukov, Maria Kunilovskaya and Andrei Semenov

(RE: Russia) If you are communicating on a social media site or just scrolling your timeline, and you think you are simply observing a cross-section of society and its responses to current events, then you are deeply mistaken. You are falling into a specially designed trap. Social media has long ceased to be a space of pure freedom. Now these websites are flooded with an army of trolls, bots and paid influencers that make up the infrastructure of online political astroturfing. This concept originated in the U.S. in the mid-1980s and takes its name from AstroTurf, a company that supplied turf that mimicked natural grass(roots) to stadiums. Similarly, social or political astroturfing is the imitation of grassroots initiatives and campaigns, which are designed to falsify “popular opinion” and create a distorted impression of the prevailing social mood. The aim of this is to emulate a pro-government majority and in doing so frighten any opposition with the intensity of this engagement. This happens in authoritarian regimes the same way that they falsify elections and control traditional media.

As research has shown, over the past decade, Russia has created a powerful infrastructure of “networked authoritarianism”, which implements “third generation controls” aimed not at restriction but at the active creation of social media content. As the authors demonstrate in their analysis of the strategies of online astroturfing and the real responses of social media users to the war in Ukraine and “partial mobilisation”, social networks today are a site of confrontation and contestation between the real users and the “astroturfing army” created by the regime. The strategies of astroturfing within this conflict are quite diverse and varied, but social media propaganda is not always a success. Nonetheless, it seriously distorts our perceptions of “grassroots sentiment”.

The Russian public reaction to Putin’s announcement of ‘partial mobilisation’ was far from that desired by Russia’s authoritarian regime. Up to 700,000 citizens left the country in order to dodge the draft over the course of two weeks, mass protests erupted across the country, and the approval ratings of the president and key political institutions slid as a result. In order to counter this reaction, the Kremlin mobilised both broadcast and online media. State media received a new set of guidelines [temniki] instructing them to emphasise the limited nature of ‘partial mobilisation’ and that it would affect only 1% of reservists – younger men with military experience. In addition, the regime mobilised bloggers to promote the hashtag #nopanic [#безпаники] and to compare the number of mobilised men to 1% of everyday objects such as a woman’s makeup bag, a portion of fries, or a pack of candies in order to downplay the scale of the event. […]

Read More © RE: Russia

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