Authoritarian Propaganda in a High-Choice Media Environment

• In Event: Propaganda, Censorship, and Self-Censorship in Putin’s Russia

Abstract

Contemporary saturated digital media environments pose a threat to authoritarian rule. Despite the autocratic government's control over mainstream news channels, citizens have access to information that questions the regime's official narratives through social media and numerous independent media channels. This challenge forces autocrats to rely on more sophisticated strategies to shape public perceptions. As it is no longer possible to simply censor all alternative information, autocrats must rely on more active strategies spinning public perception of politics across the information space. As projecting positive perceptions of the regime in a high-choice media environment becomes more challenging task, the regime has incentives to persuade citizens to abstain from politics rather than rally their support. To explore these strategies, we focus on how Putin's authoritarian regime used social media to shape public perceptions of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. We rely on a large corpus of war-related messages retrieved from the mainstream Russian online media and major social media platforms (N = 2,000,000) to build a realistic snapshot of political communication about the war. Using corpus and computational linguistics methods, we identify two major framings used by online state media and regime-controlled social media groups to shape perceptions of the war. First, the regime relies on disinformation framing – a set of rhetorical strategies aimed at confusing the citizens and undermining the credibility of alternative sources. Second, the regime relies on depoliticisation framing – a set of rhetorical strategies used to portray the war as a natural and inevitable process which is not possible to resist and comprehend for ordinary citizens rather than a political issue which should be a subject to public deliberation. While in the beginning of the invasion these framings were spread in a top-down, strategic fashion from online state media to social media to support the government’s narrative on the war, later they became an entrenched and persistent feature of both online state media communications and citizen discourse on domestic politics, economy, culture, and society. These results contribute to the understanding of how authoritarian regimes can adapt to the challenges of a high-choice media environment.

Authors

• Maxim Alyukov, University of Manchester

• Maria Kunilovskaya, University of Saarland

• Andrei Semenov, Nazarbayev University