Social Policy on Social Media: How Opposition Actors Used Twitter and VKontakte to Oppose the Russian Pension Reform

Abstract

How do opposition actors in electoral authoritarian regimes use social media to galvanize support? Based on 2,229 social media posts, I examine how Aleksey Navalny and the Communist Party (KPRF) politicize grievances about the pension reform of 2018 and use Twitter and VKontakte for protest mobilization. I find that Navalny integrates the reform in his narrative of government corruption and theft, strategically using the platforms' different advantages. The KPRF frames less coherently and makes no distinction between VKontakte and Twitter. These differences, I argue, are mainly due to actors' different target audiences and their respective position in the authoritarian political system

My war is your special operation: Engagement with pro- and anti-regime framing of the war in Ukraine on Russian social media

“…While social media-based discussions are not representative of the general societal opinions in most contexts, their representativeness becomes even low in the case with contemporary Russia since users might be hesitant to post anti-war content due to the fear of persecution and such content can be removed by the Russian social media platforms. This is connected to the fact that while before the Russian invasion VK maintained at least some anti-regime public groups and pages on the platform (Urman, 2019) with Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny even able to strategically utilize VK to spread his messages (Dollbaum, 2021), in recent years VK has blocked almost all anti-regime communities, with the blocking efforts accelerating since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine (Meaker, 2022). Second, for our data collection we used only two terms -"war" and "special operation"whereas other terms (e.g., "invasion" or "conflict") might also be related to the respective frames.…”

The Evolution of Authoritarianism and Contentious Action in Russia

“…Twitter in Russia is considerably lower compared to the more popular social network, VK, especially outside of Moscow and Saint Petersburg, Twitter remains a key platform for opposition activists and politicians to communicate with their audiences (Alieva et al, 2022;Dollbaum, 2021b) and overseas users, for example, English speakers or Russians living overseas. Alexanyan et al (2012) argue that Twitter users form distinct clusters and maintain user communities within Russian regions, fostering more consistent engagement and community formation.…”