Differentiable characteristics of Telegram mediums during protests in Belarus 2020 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Telegram in Belarusian Protests of 2020: Affective Tool for Populist's Uprisings
Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media (digitalicons.org), 2023
Certain political uprisings might be associated with this or that particular digital platform (for example, 'Arab spring' and Twitter). The 2020-2021 Belarusian protest is well-known for the popularity of Telegram messenger among the peaceful protesters. This large-scale and longest uprising in Belarusian history might be well described as 'Telegramrevolution' in future. This article looks into the role of Telegram messenger in mediating the protests to the wider public. The notion of populism by Ernesto Laclau is employed to describe the agenda of the Belarusian protest, which united wide masses of the population against the common enemy, at the same time lacking a strong positive agenda. Paradoxically, two of the most prominent events in the history of Belarusian politics can be described as populist's in Laclau's sense. It was the election of Lukashenko in 1994 and protests against him in 2020. Affect here is understood as a specific means with which the users of Belarusian Telegram were involved in populist protest of 2020. It operates outside the rational way of understanding politics, emphasising the intensity of involvement itself. The article explores the affective involvement of Belarusian Telegram users in protests of 2020.
Post-Soviet Affairs, 2022
During moments of nationwide mass mobilization, what distinguishes the towns and cities that rise in the first week from those that do not see protest? Taking the case of nationwide protests in Belarus in August 2020, this study employs an original protest event catalogue to investigate what drives mobilization in early-rising localities. I test hypotheses in the protest literature relating to whether pre-existing social networks, or pre-election campaign rallies, influence subsequent protest mobilization. The innovative use of Telegram data demonstrates the platform's value for social scientists studying protest. My results suggest that pre-existing social networks help drive mobilization in localities by facilitating communication, coordination, and engagement prior to protest onset, priming people to be ready when the moment of protest arrives. This article also highlights the impressive scale of nationwide mobilization in Belarus in 2020, and demonstrates that local networks were engaging in widespread opposition activity even before mass mobilization.
Social Media and Protest Participation: Evidence from Russia
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2015
Do new communication technologies, such as social media, reduce collective action problem? This paper provides evidence that penetration of VK, the dominant Russian online social network, affected protest activity during a wave of protests in Russia in 2011. As a source of exogenous variation in network penetration, we use information on the city of origin of the students who studied together 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%. At the same time, VK penetration increased pro-governmental support, with no evidence of increased polarization. Additional results suggest that social media has affected protest activity by reducing the costs of coordination, rather than by spreading information critical of the government. We find that cities with higher fractionalization of network users between VK and Facebook experienced fewer protests, and there is a critical mass of VK users necessary to jumpstart the protests. Finally, we provide suggestive evidence that municipalities with higher VK penetration received smaller transfers from the central government after the occurrence of protests.
Social Science Computer Review, 2017
The article analyzes the nature of communication flows during social conflicts via the digital platform Twitter. We gathered over 150,000 tweets from citizen protests for nine environmental social movements in Chile and used a mixed methods approach to show that long-standing paradigms for social mobilization and participation are neither replicated nor replaced but reshaped. In digital platforms, long-standing communication theories, like the 1955 two-step flow model, are still valid, while direct one-step flows and more complex network flows are also present. For example, we show that it is no contradiction that social media participants mainly refer to intermediating amplifiers of communicated messages (39% of the mentions from participants go through this two-step communication flow), while at the same time, traditional media outlets and official protest voices receive 80–90% of their mentions directly through a direct one-step flow from the same participants. While nonintuitive at first sight, Bayes’s theorem allows to detangle the different perspectives on the arising communication channel. We identify the strategic importance of a group of amplifying intermediaries in local positions of the networks, who coexist with specialized voices and professional media outlets at the center of the global network. We also show that direct personalized messages represent merely 20% of the total communication. This shows that the fine-grained digital footprint from social media enables us to go beyond simplistic views of a single all-encompassing step flow model for social communication. The resulting research agenda builds on long-standing theories with a new set of tools.
Online social networks and offline protest
Large-scale protests occur frequently and sometimes overthrow entire political systems. Meanwhile, online social networks have become an increasingly common component of people's lives. We present a large-scale longitudinal study that connects online social media behaviors to offline protest. Using almost 14 million geolocated tweets and data on protests from 16 countries during the Arab Spring, we show that increased coordination of messages on Twitter using specific hashtags is associated with increased protests the following day. The results also show that traditional actors like the media and elites are not driving the results. These results indicate social media activity correlates with subsequent large-scale decentralized coordination of protests, with important implications for the future balance of power between citizens and their states.
The article analyzes the nature of communication flows during social conflicts via the digital platform Twitter. We gathered over 150,000 Tweets from citizen protests for nine environmental social movements in Chile, and use a mixed-methods approach to show that longstanding paradigms for social mobilization and participation are neither replicated nor replaced, but reshaped. In digital platforms, long standing communication theories, like the 1955 two-step flow model, are still valid, while direct one-step flows and more complex network flows are also present. For example, we show that it is no contradiction that participants mainly refer to intermediating amplifiers (39 % of the mentions from participants go through this two-step flow), while at the same time traditional media outlets and official protest voices receive 80-90 % of their mentions directly through a direct one-step flow from the same participants. While non-intuitive at first sight, Bayes' theorem allows to detangle the different perspectives in the arising communication channel. We identify the strategic importance of a group of amplifying intermediaries in local positions of the networks, who coexist with specialized voices and professional media outlets at the center of the global network. We also show that direct personalized messages represent merely 20 % of the total communication. This shows that the fine-grained digital footprint from social media enable us to go beyond simplistic views of a single all-encompassing step-flow model for social communication. The resulting research agenda builds on longstanding theories with a new set of tools.
Social unrest through new technologies: Twitter as a political tool
2019
Introduction. The 15-M movement (also referred to as the Anti-austerity Movement, the Indignados Movement, and Take the Square), marked a turning point in the way of understanding politics at all levels in Spain. Even today, political party Podemos is considered to be the direct heir of this movement, which occupied the front-pages of newspapers around the world in the weeks following the demonstrations of 15 May 2011 and sent aftershocks across the globe. The power of the Spanish civil society was manifested in full force, turning aside from political parties and politicised groups. This revolution was made possible by online social networks, which allowed previous movements to unify into one. Thanks to today's technology, social networks can be monitored to capture their importance in the genesis, development and maintenance of this popular movement. Methods and results. The study is based on the review of Twitter's key indicators, such as the trending topics and hashtags, as well as the review of the birth of the movement and its main lines of work, based on the dissemination of its activity, rather than on a sociological or content analysis perspective. The conclusions are in line with those drew in previous research works, which have served as the statistical corpus to frame the data obtained through empirical methods that are not commonly used in the social sciences.
The Role of Internet Based Social Networks in Russian Protest Movement Mobilization
Central European Journal of International and Security Studies , 2017
One of the unmistakable characteristics of Russia’s ‘White House’ uprising that led to the regime change in August of 1991 was its broad popular support. The political upheaval that initially found a buttress in Muscovite urban middle classes soon transcended all social strata and geography ending dominance of the Communist Party in Russia. However, the mass protests in opposition to authoritarian rule that gained energy in 2011has failed to generate the same momentum necessary to unite diverse social and political classes and topple the ruling regime. In both cases, social Networks of communication played an important role in the evolution of contentious politics because they connected actors across space, facilitated communication, exchanged information on tactics and strategies, and produced new knowledge. However, it is not clear exactly how such social networks interacted with other contextual factors to bring about a national protest movement of su cient proportions to topple an authoritarian regime. Drawing on evidence from the popular protests in the Russian Federation between 2011 and 2014, surveys conducted among quiescent citizens, participants in popular protest and digital activists, this paper argues that social media (1) allowed a “digital activists” to form personal networks that initially circumvented the national media narrative by brokering information for outside mainstream media; (2) helped to overcome the “free rider” problem of collective action by catalyzing anger-frustration and reporting the magnitude of protest events; and (3) contributed in the formation of a collective identity supportive of protest activity that transcended geographical and socio-economic disparities by providing a shared, mobilizing element of emotional grievance; (4) the internet based social networks have failed to produce results exemplified by Twitter and Facebook revolutions of the Arab Spring, and eject regime change in the Russian Federation or make tangible impact on domestic policies.
Communication power struggles on social media: A case study of the 2011–12 Russian protests
Journal of Information Technology & Politics
In 2011-2012 Russia experienced a wave of mass protests surrounding the Duma and presidential elections. The protests, however, faded shortly after the second election. We study the Russian political discourse on Twitter during this period and the main actors involved: the pro-government camp, the opposition, and the general public. We analyze around 700,000 Twitter messages and investigate the social networks of the most active Twitter users. Our analysis shows that progovernment users employed a variety of communication strategies to shift the political discourse and marginalize oppositional voices on Twitter. This demonstrates how authorities can disempower regime critics and successfully manipulate public opinion on social media.
Collective Action on Facebook and Telegram During the Russia–Ukraine War
European Conference on Social Media
Social media have been used for political bottom-up organizing and collective action since at least the Arab Spring protests. Social media provide unique affordances that reduce the costs of collective action facilitating anonymous communication and cooperation at a much larger scale than ever before. The Russian invasion of Ukraine provides multiple examples of social media use for collective action. In this conflict, social media platforms, most prominently Facebook and Telegram have been actively employed by Ukrainians as places for organisation, volunteering and gathering support from a variety of volunteers both inside the country and abroad. After nine months of the war, it can safely be said that volunteering has played a huge role in the resistance to Russian aggression. However, little is known about how collective action has been organised on social media during this conflict. This paper aims to advance knowledge on the subject by focusing on how different forms of collect...