APPENDIX: THEORETICAL MODEL IN THE SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL, we expand on how we construct our theoretical framework. Building on the work by Little (2016), we examine how, by providing more precise information about the quality of the government and protest logistics, social media can affect the number of people choosing to turn out to protest or express support for the authoritarian regime. We also explore the way the effect of social media depends on city size and the existence of threshold behavior in the relationship between VK penetration and protests.
Do new communication technologies, such as social media, alleviate the collective action problem? This paper provides evidence that penetration of VK, the dominant Russian online social network, led to more protest activity during a wave of protests in Russia in 2011. As a source of exogenous variation in network penetration, we use the information on the city of origin of the students who studied with the founder of VK, controlling for the city of origin of the students who studied at the same university several years earlier or later. We find that a 10% increase in VK penetration increased the probability of a protest by 4.6% and the number of protesters by 19%. Additional results suggest that social media induced protest activity by reducing the costs of coordination rather than by spreading information critical of the government. We observe that VK penetration increased pro‐governmental support, with no evidence of increased polarization. We also find that cities with higher fractionalization of network users between VK and Facebook experienced fewer protests, and the effect of VK on protests exhibits threshold behavior.
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