Russian Twitter disinformation campaigns reach across the American political spectrum

Evidence from an analysis of Twitter data reveals that Russian social media trolls exploited racial and political identities to infiltrate distinct groups of authentic users, playing on their group identities. The groups affected spanned the ideological spectrum, suggesting the importance of coordinated counter-responses from diverse coalitions of users

Urban murals and the post-protest imagery of networked publics: the remediated aftermath of Ukraine’s Euromaidan on instagram

In modern hyper-mediated urban environments, public art becomes an inseparable part of the multiplicity of meanings generated by citizens with regards to their city, their country and each other. What meanings can public art convey after a protest in a mediated city? And how do social media users capture and reflect on these visual artefacts? This article focuses on the urban murals that appeared in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital in the post-Euromaidan period (spring 2014 – present day). The creation of murals began as a spontaneous urban practice, but post-protest, morphed into a concerted effort to populate blank walls of decaying apartment blocks around cities with meaningful art, reflecting on the turbulent political, social and cultural changes in the country. The article considers how this mediated public art form resonates with the networked post-protest publics through the affordances of Instagram and explores the different kinds of meanings networked publics in and around the post-protest city can produce. It focuses on how the mediation of the murals on Instagram might reflect or frame the meanings embedded in the murals themselves and how these themes might fit into the broader metaphorical narrative of rebirth and regeneration in the post-Euromaidan city of Kyiv

Be safe or be seen? How Russian activists negotiate visibility and security in online resistance practices

This paper examines how Russian opposition activists negotiate online visibility—their own and that of their messages and campaigns—and the security concerns brought on by the pervasive digital surveillance that the state resorts to in order to reinstate its control over the online discursive space. By examining the internet-based presence and activity of the members of Alexey Navalny’s FBK (Anti-Corruption Foundation) and other opposition activists, the paper traces connections between everyday security practices that these activists engage in online and the resistance tactics and repertoires they enact in an environment where the free and open exchange of information on the Russian internet is becoming increasingly difficult. The analysis finds that Russian opposition activists place a high value on digital, media, and security literacy and that navigating the internet using security tools and protocols such as VPN, two-phase authentication, and encrypted messaging is increasingly seen as the default modus operandi for those participating in organised dissent in Russia to mitigate growing state surveillance. Furthermore, the analysis reveals that Russian activists have to balance the need for security with growing visibility—a key factor for entering the mainstream political and social discourse. The tension between being secure and being visible emerges as a key aspect of resistance practices in an environment of near-constant state surveillance, as activists concurrently manage their safety and visibility online to minimise the risks posed by government spying and maximise the effect of their dissent

Data Subjects vs. People’s Data: Competing Discourses of Privacy and Power in Modern Russia

The notion of individual privacy has always been a political one throughout Russia’s Soviet and post-Soviet periods, but in the age of all-encompassing datafication and digitisation of identities, privacy has become an even more contested concept. This article considers how Russian state officials and Russian digital rights advocates construct the notion of privacy in their public online discourses. I argue that how these actors talk about privacy helps shape the norms and the politics around it in Russia. An in-depth analysis of activity reports published online by the state internet regulator and a grassroots digital rights group reveals competing privacy discourses underpinned by differential understandings of how anonymity, secrecy, confidentiality, and control of personal data determine the distribution of power and agency in Russian public and political life. These differential interpretations of privacy inform the contentious politics that emerge around how privacy is regulated and negotiated within the greater regulatory and normative framework of digital citizenship in Russia. Thus, the article offers critical insights into the contestation of citizenship and, consequently, the distribution of power in more and less democratic systems

Articulating networked citizenship on the Russian internet: a case for competing affordances

The Russian government’s crackdown on free speech online has seen social media users jailed and fined for publishing critical content. Digital rights activists have cautioned Russians to delete their accounts on platforms that cooperate with law enforcement, but also have advocated for the use of privacy and secure tools. How do these actions inform emergent articulations of networked citizenship in Russia? Using activity reports published online by the state Internet regulator and two digital activist groups, I conduct a narrative analysis of how both parties interpret networked citizenship. I find that the networked authoritarian Russian state embraces the ideal of the dutiful networked citizen online as visible, vulnerable, and controlled, exploiting the melding of public and private aspects of networked publics. Instead, Russian digital rights activists advocate for a self-actualizing networked citizen who exercises agency online by becoming less visible, often ephemeral, and therefore, more secure. This reinterpretation contests the traditional affordances of networked publics and questions conventional ideas of citizenship, agency, and digital rights in the context of non-democratic societies

Augmented Dissent: The Affordances of ICTs for Citizen Protest (A Case Study of the Ukraine Euromaidan Protests of 2013-2014).

This dissertation research project uses the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine to inform and shape a theory of augmented dissent to help explain the complex ways in which protest participants guided by the political, social, and cultural contexts engage in dissent augmented by ICTs in a reality where both the physical and the digital are used in concert. The purpose of this research is to conceptualize the use and perception of ICTs in protest activity using the communicative affordances framework. Through a mixed-method research approach involving interviews with protest participants, as well as qualitative and thematic analysis of online content from social media pages of several key Euromaidan protest communities, the research project examines the role ICTs played in the information and media landscape during the Euromaidan protest. The findings of the online content analysis were used to inform the questions for the 59 semi-structured, open-ended interviews with Euromaidan protest participants in Ukraine and abroad. The research findings provide in-depth insights about how ICTs were used and perceived by protest participants, and their role as vehicles for information and civic media content. The study employs the theoretical framework of social media affordances to interpret the data gathered during the interviews and content analysis to better understand how digital media augmented citizens’ protest activity through affording them new possibilities for dissent, and how they made meaning of said protest activity as augmented by ICTs. The findings contribute towards shaping a theory of digitally augmented dissent that conceptualizes the complex relationship between citizens and ICTs during protest activity as an affordance-driven one, where online and offline tools and activity merge into a unified dissent space and extend or augment the possibilities for action in interesting, and sometimes unexpected ways. Such a conceptual model could inform broader theories about civic participation and digital activism in the post-Soviet world and beyond, as ICTs become an inseparable part of civic life

Ukraine is Europe? Complicating the concept of the ‘European’ in the wake of an urban protest

This essay examines citizens’ use of cities as communicative spaces for expressing “Europeanness” – both in everyday life and in moments of mass mobilisation. It critically reflects on the notion of European urbanity as an aspirational, yet problematic ideal and seeks to decentre (Western) Europe as the default source of ideas about what it means to be European by attending to “peripheral” voices at Europe’s edge. It examines the events and symbolism of Ukraine’s 2013–2014 Euromaidan protest and its aftermath as a microcosm that reflects the broader negotiation of Ukraine’s imaginary of Europe and its own place within that imaginary

The Future of visibility: imagining possibilities for networked civic discontent

Expressions of public discontent are traditionally considered one of the key elements of performing citizenship. This article explores the potential futures of technologically augmented discontent and the implications these future scenarios might have for civil society as a source of alternative voices on key social issues and civic rights. Though there are many issues at stake for civil society actors participating in social protest, I focus on the issue of visibility of discontent and the role of future technologies, such as drone imaging, AR, VR, holographic technology and AI, in making social protest more or less visible. I conceptualise the future potentialities of technologically augmented protest visibility through the prism of technological affordances theory. Affordances refer to the potential opportunities or limitations of action that emerge at the nexus of actor intentions, technological capabilities and the environment in which they interact. Such a context-dependent approach is useful in horizon scanning as it allows to account for a number of potential scenarios and to speculate how each may shape the value and impact of certain technological interventions for particular civic publics

Translating Protest: Networked Diasporas and Transnational Mobilisation in Ukraine’s Euromaidan Protests

This study combines ethnographic and computational approaches to critically examine what gets 'lost in translation' when studying intersecting social contexts of diasporic mobilisation around homeland politics. Considering how Ukrainians living in the U.S. engaged with homeland politics during the Euromaidan protests, we map transnational diasporic mobilisation, shining light on the various material, discursive, and affective connections that emerged in the process. We find that Euromaidan protests were a point of passage – and thus, convergence – between the often incongruous notions of national identity across regional as well as national territorial borders. Translating the local meanings and cultural codes associated with the Euromaidan protests, diasporas sought to amplify them to reach global audiences through their use of the grammars and vocabularies of socially mediated protest. Situating our inquiry in networked diasporic discourses and building on a decolonial understanding of Ukraine's history and politics, our approach illuminates the possibilities for studying transnational mobilisation and activism as a heterogeneous network of publics, discourses, and identity practices

Is Telegram a “harbinger of freedom”? The performance, practices, and perception of platforms as political actors in authoritarian states

This paper examines the practices, performance, and perceptions of the messaging platform Telegram as an actor in the 2020 Belarus protests, using publicly available data from Telegram’s public statements, protest-related Telegram groups, and media coverage. Developing a novel conceptualization of platform actorness, we critically assess Telegram’s role in the protests and examine whether Telegram is seen as playing an active role in Belarusian contentious politics. We find that Telegram’s performance and practices drive citizens to form affective connections to the platform and to perceive Telegram as an ally in their struggle against repressions and digital censorship. Meanwhile, the Belarusian state uses Telegram’s aversion to censorship and content moderation to intervene in contentious politics by co-opting grassroots approaches and mimicking manipulative efforts of other authoritarian regimes. Our conceptual framework is applicable to post-Soviet authoritarian contexts, but can also serve as a useful heuristic for analyzing platform actorness in other regime types