“Salience vs. Commitment: Dynamics of Political Hashtags in Russian Twitter”
By Vladimir Barash and John Kelly

Building off our recent mapping of Russian Twitter, in this paper we analyze the dynamics of political hashtags representing a range of political issues and big news stories–from terrorist bombings, to pro-government issues, to topics preferred by the opposition. This work was made possible thanks to the generous support of the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Social media sites like Twitter enable users to engage in the spread of contagious phenomena: everything from information and rumors to social movements and virally marketed products. In particular, Twitter has been observed to function as a platform for political discourse, allowing political movements to spread their message and engage supporters, and also as a platform for information diffusion, allowing everyone from mass media to citizens to reach a wide audience with a critical piece of news. Previous work suggests that different contagious phenomena will display distinct propagation dynamics, and in particular that news will spread differently through a population than other phenomena. We leverage this theory to construct a system for classifying contagious phenomena based on the properties of their propagation dynamics, by combining temporal and network features. Our system, applicable to phenomena in any social media platform or genre, is applied to a dataset of news-related and political hashtags diffusing through the population of Russian Twitter users. Our results show that news-related hashtags have a distinctive pattern of propagation across the spectrum of Russian Twitter users. In contrast, we find that political hashtags display a number of different dynamic signatures corresponding to different politically active sub-communities. Analysis using ‘chronotopes’ sharpens these findings and reveals an important propagation pattern we call ‘resonant salience.’

This is the fourth in a series of papers that will be released over the coming months. Previous research on the Russian Internet include our baseline network analysis of Russian Twitter, “Mapping Russian Twitter,” our study of the Russian blogosphere, “Public Discourse in the Russian Blogosphere: Mapping RuNet Politics and Mobilization” and “Exploring Russian Cyberspace: Digitally-Mediated Collective Action and the Networked Public Sphere.” An overview of past and upcoming publications can be found here: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/research/ru…. For further information about the Berkman Center’s project on the Impact of the Internet on Russian Politics, Media, and Society please visit: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/research/ru….

As always, we welcome your feedback.

The Berkman Center is pleased to announce the next publication in its series of papers on the Russian Internet:

“Mapping Russian Twitter”
By John Kelly, Vladimir Barash, Karina Alexanyan, Bruce Etling, Robert Faris, Urs Gasser, and John Palfrey

Using methods similar to our studies of the Persian, Arabic and Russian blogospheres, this paper shares the results of a large-scale social network analysis of Russian Twitter, with a focus on political users. This work was made possible thanks to the generous support of the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Drawing from a corpus of over 50 Million Russian language tweets collected between March 2010 and March 2011, the research team created a network map of 10,285 users comprising the ‘discussion core’ of Russian Twitter, and clustered them based on a combination of network features. The resulting segmentation revealed key online constituencies active in Russian Twitter. The major topical groupings in Russian Twitter include: Political, Instrumental, CIS Regional, Technology, and Music. There are also several clusters centered on Russian regions, which is significant given the limited reach of the Internet in the regions outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Similar to the Russian blogosphere, the Twitter network includes a democratic opposition cluster associated with Gary Kasparov and the opposition Solidarity movement. In other respects the political clusters identified in blogs and Twitter networks display interesting variation. Nationalists, who are very active in Russian blogs, do not appear to be organized in Russian Twitter (at least as of March 2011). Conversely, pro-Putin youth groups like the Young Guards and Nashi, and elected officials allied with them, have a distinct Twitter footprint.

This is the third in a series of papers that will be released over the coming months. Previous research on the Russian Internet includes our study of the Russian blogosphere, “Public Discourse in the Russian Blogosphere: Mapping RuNet Politics and Mobilization” and “Exploring Russian Cyberspace: Digitally-Mediated Collective Action and the Networked Public Sphere.” An overview of past and upcoming publications can be found here: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/research/ru…. For further information about the Berkman Center’s project on the Impact of the Internet on Russian Politics, Media, and Society please visit: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/research/ru….

As always, we welcome your feedback.

In English and in Russian (thanks to the translation expertise of Gregory Asmolov), here is the full abstract for the paper:

**

This paper summarizes the major findings of a three-year research project to investigate the Internet’s impact on Russian politics, media and society. We employed multiple methods to study online activity: the mapping and study of the structure, communities and content of the blogosphere; an analogous mapping and study of Twitter; content analysis of different media sources using automated and human-based evaluation approaches; and a survey of bloggers; augmented by infra- structure mapping, interviews and background research. We find the emergence of a vibrant and diverse networked public sphere that constitutes an independent alternative to the more tightly controlled offline media and political space, as well as the growing use of digital platforms in social mobilization and civic action. Despite various indirect efforts to shape cyberspace into an environment that is friendlier towards the government, we find that the Russian Internet remains generally open and free, although the current degree of Internet freedom is in no way a prediction of the future of this contested space.

****

*Аннотация*

В данной статье представлены основные результаты трехлетнего проекта, целью которого было изучить влияние Интернета на российскую политику, средства массовой информации и общество. Для исследования общения и деятельности пользователей интернета мы использовали различные методы: отображение и исследование структуры, сообществ и содержания блогосферы и контента в Твиттере; опрос блогеров, контент-анализ различных средств массовой информации: как с помощью автоматизированных методов, так и с помощью экспертов.

Мы открыли существование живого и чрезвычайно разнообразного публичного пространства, которое представляет собой альтернативу более контролируемым официальным средствам массовой информации. Мы считаем возможным говорить об электронных платформах, на основе которых происходит социальная мобилизация гражданских действий. Несмотря на различные попытки превратить кибер-пространство в пространство, поддерживающее правительство, наше исследование показывает, что Российский Интернет все еще остается свободным и открытым. Тем не менее, несмотря на существующую свободу Рунета, очень сложно делать какие-то предсказания относительно его будущего.

**

Please note that we are working to provide a full translation in the future.
In the meantime, we welcome your comments at the Internet & Democracy Blog.

If we’ve whetted your appetite for more research on all things related to the role of the Internet in Russian society, we welcome you to take a fresh look at our October 2010 Russian blog paper, Public Discourse in the Russian Blogosphere: Mapping RuNet Politics and Mobilization.

Also, please keep an eye on our paper series page for future publications over the coming months, and check out the same site for a short description of each paper we’re planning to release.

Enjoy!

Over the course of the weekend, a seemingly coordinated distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack flooded a number of the leading Russian independent media, election monitoring and blogging sites. Many users and content publishers, including the Global Voices RuNet project, have been reporting the attacks against sites including LiveJournal, Echo of Moscow, Novaya Gazeta, New Times, Bolshoi Gorod, Golos.org, ikso.org, ridus.ru, zaks.ru, and the online ‘map of violations’ created by the election monitoring group Golos (which has been the target since last week of a government campaign against ‘outside’ influence on the election (they are funded by US and European groups). LiveJournal, which is the biggest blog host in Russia and according to our research is the blogging platform where Russian political discourse is most prevalent, was also attacked. There are continued reports of LiveJournal’s inaccessibility inside Russia over the last couple days, and shorter term attacks on sites such as levada.ru, the Web site of the leading independent polling firm in Russia.

DDoS and other sorts of cyber attacks on independent media have been common in recent years. One of the difficult things about understanding the cause and impact of DDoS attacks is that it is rarely clear who is behind the attacks. We have little or no evidence, for instance, that the Russian government is involved in these or other attacks. This is partly due to the nature of DDoS attacks, which often come from large collections of infected computers and so are very difficult to track back to the responsible actor. Governments have also avoided taking responsibility for these sorts of attacks, in constrast to the way that many government happily defend their filtering practices, perhaps because the attacks are often associated with the cyber-criminal gangs who build and run botnets.

What makes these attacks different is the number of sites attacked at the same time, and their close timing around the elections. We asked our friends at Arbor Networks, a leading provider of DDoS monitoring and protection services for Internet service providers and large content hosts, for any data they have on these attacks. Among other DDoS monitoring systems, Arbor has a large collection of taps installed in botnets, through which they are able to listen to the commands sent to the botnets. Jose Nazario reported back to us that starting on December 1 and continuing through the election on December 4, they saw commands come from just two botnet controllers to attacks the following list of sites, nearly all of which are independent media or election monitoring sites:

New Times (Oppositional news site The New Times)
Echo of Moscow (Leading Independent radio station Echo of Moscow)
Novaya Gazeta (Major oppositional newspaper Novaya Gazeta, often critical of the Kremlin)
Novaya St. Petersburg (St. Petersburg Novaya Gazeta site)
Kommersant (Major Russian news daily)
Public Post (online news site, had published stories about map of violations and Golos)
Slon (Online News site, partnered with Golos to publish ‘map of violations’ after Gazeta backed out)
Bolshoi Gorod (St. Petersburg news site)
Golos (Website of independent election monitor Golos)
Ikso (an outlier, the election commission of Sverdlovsk region)
Ridus (online news/citizen journalism site)
Zaks (a popular political website in St. Petersburg)
Pryaniki (a popular portal in Tula)
Map of Violations (Golos crowdsourced election violations map/site)
files.kartanarusheniy.ru (sub domain of ‘map of violations’ site)
LiveJournal (Major Russian blog platform)
Kotlin Forum (not accessible: Yandex search indicates a forum related to Kronshdat)
Kotlin (not accessible, Yandex search indicates news and info related to Kronshdat region)
GosZakupki (another apparent outlier in the group, a portal for Russian federal and local government tenders)
The Other Tver (oppositional Tver news and analysis site)
RosAgit (Web site connected to activist and blogger Alexey Navalny, which today is focused on promoting protests across Russia scheduled for December 10).

Botnets are often rented out for a variety of reasons, including spam, click fraud, and credit card theft, as well as DDoS attacks. It could be a coincidence that two botnet controllers were independently rented by a collection of actors to attack these sites during the election, but that coincidence seems highly unlikely. It is much more likely that some one or two actors was trying to take down a broad swatch of the Russian independent media landscape during the critical period of the election. We have see many, many attacks against individual media sources in the past in Russia, but we are not aware of any previous coordinated attacks against this number of sites at the same time.

The Arbor data, of course, says nothing about why these sites were attacked, but one argument put forward by editor-in-chief of Echo of Moscow Alexey Vendediktov (and many others), certainly seems plausible: “The attack on the website on election day is clearly an attempt to inhibit publication of information about violations.” Several, if not most, of these sites invited users to submit information on election violations, especially Golos, their violations map, Slon and Echo of Moscow. The timing of the attacks is also hard to see as coincidental, overlapping closely with the times that polls were open on Election Day. Most of the attacks also ended once the polls were closed. As is usual for these types of attacks, no one has claimed responsibility, even though they seem to clearly serve the interests of the government.

As the Berkman Center noted in its DDoS report last year, for media and NGOs that think they might be subject to a DDoS attack, putting data and information on major social media and Internet sites (like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google, etc.) is a good back up plan, especially for smaller organizations with limited tech staff, since these major hosting sites are far more well prepared to defend against these types of attacks. For example, to our knowledge, the Google doc with over 5000 election violations created by Golos after its site was disabled, was never taken down. Alexei Sidorenko also has other details of how sites like Novaya Gazeta that were better prepared for the attack were able to help host Echo of Moscow blogs, which argues for these groups to support each other and host one another’s content, acting as a sort of ‘mutual aid society,’ which Jonathan Zittrain has written about. Also, we checked with one prominent Russian independent media site that we had worked with during the writing of the DDoS report about whether they had been attacked, and that site responded that they had used Twitter for all of their election coverage, specifically to avoid DDoS attacks. That site’s strategy was successful, as Twitter was either not attacked or withstood any attack during the election.

Gregory Asmolov at Global Voices has the most exhaustive list of sites attacked that I’ve seen:

thenewtimes.ru, echo.msk.ru, novayagazeta.ru, kommersant.ru, publicpost.ru, slon.ru, Bolshoy Gorod (bg.ru), golos.org, ikso.org, ridus.ru, zaks.ru (Saint Petersburg), pryaniki.org (Tula), crowdsourcing platform “Karta Narusheniy” and Livejournal platform.

Alexey Sidorenko has a couple updates on his Twitter feed @sidorenko_intl

And the Moscow times election live blog also has some details and updates.

Here’s another cool blog map from our friend and research partner John Kelly (with whom we’ve studied the Persian, Arabic and Russian blogospheres–but this map is part of his work at Morningside Analytics). The above image is a visualization of bloggers that link to Global Voices created for GV’s leadership, including friends Ivan Sigal, Ethan Zuckerman and Rebecca MacKinnon.

I was interested to read that he thinks GV has an especially big role in online discourse in, and about, the Arab world. This was my intuition as well from the research we’ve done with John over the years, but I’ve never gotten around to asking him if that was actually the case. As John writes:

If we include English language blogs, there are at least three additional clusters that focus on the Arab world. It is fair to say that while GV has a hand in conversations around the globe, it plays an especially strong role connecting Arab discourse.

I am also interested to learn more about Russian bloggers linking to GV. It appears that this group is a bit less deeply enmeshed in the larger conversation, given their position at the bottom of the map. I’m also curious about the Echo Mosckvyi (Echo of Moscow) cluster. This is important because, as Ethan often says, citizen media punch above their weight when they are linked to, interviewed and their messages rebroadcast through traditional electronic media. The fact that there is a cluster of bloggers from an important outlet like Echo Moskvyi linking to GV may say a lot about their influence in Russia, which might not be so obvious at first glance. (A while back, David Remnick did a great New Yorker piece on the station if you want to learn more.)

While I’m excited to see this research on GV, I have to say I’m even more excited to see that John has finally started a blog, which promises to be a must read.

Russian media this week has seen the emergence of a number of prominent stories, including themes related to Russia’s budget and banking system, political appointments, energy politics, Russia’s relations with neighboring countries, bills being debated by the Duma, and concerns over forest fires in the country’s far east.

Week of June 20 – June 26 (Red) Compared to June 13 – June 19 (Blue) for Five Major Russian Media Segments (TV, Pop Blogs, Random Blogs, Mainstream Media, Government):

New issues related to domestic politics and finance seem to dominate the overall week-to-week comparison cloud, indicated by the emergence of new high frequency words (in red) such as “банк” (bank), “бюджет” (budget), “газа” (gas), and “национальной” (national).  The frequent discussion of banks this week is in part accounted for by the catastrophic failure and subsequent bailout of the Bank of Moscow, Russia’s fifth largest bank.  In what is reputed to be “the largest bailout in modern Russian history,” the bank will receive as much as $14 billion in state-backed loans, with the state-run VTB Bank increasing its stake in the company to 75%.

The Russian budget and budgetary constraints were also an important theme in this week’s news.  On Wednesday, 6/29, President Dmitry Medvedev delivered an address to the Duma laying out his three year budget guidelines for the 2012-2014 period.  Focusing on governance efficiency, modernization, competitiveness, long term development, and living standards, the President laid out 12 vital areas of budget policy that will be central to achieving national economic goals in the coming years.  In addition to his ongoing emphasis on modernization, Medvedev stressed the need for economic decentralization, with development occurring on a regional level and not just in and around the capital cities.  Budgets were also discussed in several other contexts this week, helping to account for the appearance of “бюджет” in the week’s overall word cloud.  Prime Minister Vladimir Putin made headlines for drawing attention to the need to ensure the new budget would be deficit-free.  New stories also discussed the protests in Greece related to that country’s budget debate and the possible implications for Russian oil revenue.  Nezavisimaya Gazeta reported on a new study that shows Russians on average spend 30% of their household budget on food, with poorer families spending as much as 50% of their income.  The discussion of Medvedev’s budgetary plan and related topics clearly dominated the Government media segment for the week.  New high frequency words there such as “развивать,” (develop), “реализации” (implementation), “региональных” (regional), “современные” (modern), “экономики” (economy), “экономической” (economic), and “технического” (technical) indicate the frequent discussion of some of the main components of Medvedev’s plan.

Week of June 27 – July 3 (Red) Compared to June 20 – June 26 (Blue) for Russian Government:

A couple of last week’s major stories continued to attract attention this week, with related terms showing up in purple in the week-to-week comparison cloud.  These include, for example, the nomination of St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matvienko to become Speaker of the Federation Council.  With the approval of Medvedev and Putin, this week Matvienko agreed to accept the new position.  Opposition formed in Saint Petersburg, with young Yabloko party members protesting in the street on Wednesday and the formation of an opposition bloc entitled “St. Petersburg against Matvienko.”  As the city’s governor since 2003, Matvienko had become increasingly unpopular.  Resented by local residents for her government’s failure to clear the streets of snow and ice in the winter, many have speculated that Matvienko’s move was part of an effort to buoy support for the United Russia party in preparation for the upcoming Duma elections this December.  This story’s continued prominence is indicated by the frequency of words such as “петербург” (Petersburg), “федерации” ([of the] federation), and “совет” (council) in the week’s overall cloud.  Drilling down into specific media segments, the attention garnered by Matvienko’s high profile move becomes even more apparent, with her name (“Матвиенко”) and the word “губернатор” (governor) appearing among the new high frequency words in this week’s Mainstream Media word cloud.

Week of June 27 – July 3 (Red) Compared to June 20 – June 26 (Blue) for Russian Mainstream Media:

Some additional prominent topics in the week’s news also become more apparent on examining some of the other week-to-week comparisons for particular media segments.  The ongoing controversy surrounding the corruption accusations against and trial of former Orange Revolution leader Yulia Tymoshenko in Ukraine, for example, attracted the attention of some news segments more than others.  The former prime minister was indicted last December for abuse of power, with President Victor Yanukovich claiming that she illegally used $425 million in “Kyoto money” (money received from the sale of of carbon emission quotas) to finance pensions.  If she is found guilty, Tymoshenko will be banned from holding political office.  While some variant on “Украина” (Ukraine) appears as a high frequency word over the last couple of weeks in the Mainstream Media and the Popular Blogs word clouds, this topic appears not to have received equal attention in all media segments.  A comparison between popular blogs and TV media shows that this story appears to have gotten significantly more attention in the blogosphere than in television news coverage – demonstrated by the appearance of “Украины” in red in the word cloud comparing these two media segments.

Russian Popular Blogs (Red) versus Television (Blue) for Week of June 27 – July 3:

A similar contrast can be seen in the coverage of ongoing conflict between Russia and Belarus over unpaid electricity debt for April and May.  Belarus, which has been suffering a deep economic crisis over the last several months owes Russia some 1.2 billion rubles ($43 million) – a situation which came to a crisis this week, with the Kremlin threatening to cut off Belorussian electricity supplies if this debt was not repaid by Wednesday.  Though the immediate crisis was resolved by week’s end with Belarus promising to pay its debt and Russia restoring power supplies, the tension between the two countries continued, with disagreement as to the extent to which natural gas prices should be reduced in light of the recent Belarusian currency devaluation.  This story, as with that concerning Ukraine, appears to have received more attention in some media segments than others.  In contrast to the Ukrainian trial, this story seems to have been covered more by television and mainstream media and received less scrutiny in the blogosphere.  Note the appearance of “Белоруссия” (Belarus) in blue in the word cloud comparing high frequency words in the week’s TV and Popular Blog media segments.

Week of June 20 – June 26 (Red) Compared to June 13 – June 19 (Blue) for Five Major Russian Media Segments (TV, Pop Blogs, Random Blogs, Mainstream Media, Government):

As is clear from this week’s overall comparative word cloud across five major media segments, one of the dominant themes in the week’s media has been the 70^th anniversary of the German invasion of Russia that marked the beginning of the Great Patriotic War (World War II).  The German invasion of the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa) began on June 22^nd 1941 when Nazi tanks entered Soviet territory near the town of Brest in Belarus.  It was the beginning of four years of war in which over 20 million Soviet soldiers and civilians would perish (over 13% of the population).  The anniversary, referred to as a national “Day of Memory and Sorrow,” was somberly recalled in memorial events across Russia this week.  The unusually high occurrence of various forms of words such as “война” (war), “служба” (service), “великий” (great [patriotic war]), and “военный” (military) indicates the frequency with which the war and its legacy were discussed across the five media segments over the course of this week.  Some variants of one or more of these words appear clearly in the week’s word clouds for both Mainstream Media and Television, indicating that the story had particular prominence across these segments.  In popular blogs, we also see higher than usual discussion involving words such as “советский” (Soviet), often involving discussion of Soviet history and the legacy of the war.

One of the other major stories of the week was the June 20^th crash of a passenger airplane (a Tupolev 134A-3) en route from Moscow to Petrozavodsk.  Flight RA-65691 of the airline RusAir (Русэйр) crashed and broke apart on landing, killing forty-seven out of fifty-two occupants.  This story is clearly indicated by prominent words in the week’s word cloud, such as “самолет” (airplane) and “петрозаводск” (Petrozavodsk).  One or both of these words appear in the week’s word clouds for both the Mainstream Media and TV.  The story apparently also received some prominent attention in the Government press, with “мчс” (acronym for the Russian Emergencies Ministry) appearing as one of the week’s highest frequency words for that news segment.  This theme seems to have been particularly picked up in Russian television, with additional words such as “авиакатастрофе” (aviation accident), “больницы” (hospitals), “погибших” (dead/deceased), “аэропорт” (airport), “пассажир” (passenger), “транспорт” (transportation), and “транспортакатастрофы” (transportation accident) featuring as unusually high frequency words visible in the segment-specific weekly word clouds.

A third significant set of stories of this week had to do with the appointments and nominations of officials for government positions.  Specifically, this included President Medvedev’s appointment of officials to fill leadership positions in the Ministry of the Interior (Министерство Внутренних дел Российской Федерации), the President’s apparent support for Saint Petersburg Governor Valentina Matvienko’s nomination as the new Speaker of Russia’s Federation Council (Совет Федерации), and the reappointment of Yuri Chaika as Prosecutor General (Генеральный Прокурор) by the Federation Council.  These stories are indicated by the prevalence of words such as “министерства” (ministry), “внутренних” (internal), “совет” (council), “федерации” ([of the] federation), and “генерал” (general).  The coverage of these news events appears to have been particularly strong, not surprisingly, across the Government media segment, though they also have received some attention in TV, Mainstream Media, and Popular Blogs.

Below are the week’s comparative word clouds from each of the five media segments (TV, mainstream media, government, popular blogs, and a random sample of all blogs).  Click on these figures to view interactive word clouds from which to explore themes of interest.

Week of June 20 – June 26 (Red) Compared to June 13 – June 19 (Blue) for Russian TV:

Week of June 20 – June 26 (Red) Compared to June 13 – June 19 (Blue) for Russian Mainstream Media:

Week of June 20 – June 26 (Red) Compared to June 13 – June 19 (Blue) for Russian Government:

Week of June 20 – June 26 (Red) Compared to June 13 – June 19 (Blue) for Russian Popular Blogs:

Week of June 20 – June 26 (Red) Compared to June 13 – June 19 (Blue) for Russian Random  Blogs:

Words in four prominent media segments (popular blogs, mainstream media, government, television) during the week starting 2011-06-05 (Blue) versus during the week starting 2011-06-12 (Red):

The word cloud above, comparing a combined set of main media sources from June 12^th through June 18^th 2011 (red) with the same set of sources over the previous week, June 5^th through June 11^th 2011 (blue), shows several new stories emerging (blue), but none of these are at as high a word frequency as the major words in purple (mentioned frequently both weeks) or even as the major words from the previous week (in red).  The cloud compares the combined sets of popular blogs, mainstream media sources, government media content, and television media content across the two weeks.

Some of the newly prominent words do not appear to represent any major new stories –ubiquitous names and financial terms likely appear as top words only because of a relative decline in other major stories with more uncommon terms.

The overall cosine similarity across the four media segments in Media Cloud between the week of June 05-11 and June 12-18 is 0.905, demonstrating a fairly high level of similarity between the two weeks.  This level of variation is not constant across all media forms, however.  We see some dissimilarities in the patterns of change within distinct media sources.

Government sources here seem to have shown the most significant changes in topical foci between the two weeks, with TV and mainstream media showing the second greatest amounts of change, both showing lower cosine similarity scores than that between popular blogs during this period.  This is interesting, as it indicates that the blogosphere’s topical foci have remained relatively constant while some new topics have been introduced to (or have disappeared from) the mainstream media, TV, and government sources.

In terms of coverage of key stories, it appears that there is substantial difference between the topics receiving greatest attention across the different media segments.  Most of this variation has been consistent over the last week and does not mark a dramatic shift because of the variation in coverage of a suddenly emerging pivotal story.

As we can see here, there has in fact been a modest convergence in the similarity of different news sources in the last week.  That notwithstanding, however, the differences across segments are striking.  The following word cloud shows the comparison between the content of popular blogs versus government media outlets during the June 12^th-18^th period.

Words in Popular Blogs (Blue) during the week starting 2011-06-12 versus words in Government media sources (Red) during the same week:

Here we see that coverage of war, other countries (including the US and Ukraine), Moscow, words related to the internet, politics, and the Budanov murder (colonel, Budanov, murder) all receive more attention in the popular blogs, whereas words related to economics (budget, financial), governance (regional, municipal, federal, law), citizenship (self-governance, participation, citizen) feature prominently in the government media sources.

The extremely low cosine similarity value between popular blogs and government sources is consistent with tendencies noted in previous blog posts.  Perhaps more surprising is the fact that TV media sources appear even more dissimilar from government sources, with these two media segments showing the lowest cosine similarity for the week at 0.318.

Words in TV (Blue) during the week starting 2011-06-12 versus words in Government media sources (Red) during the same week:

Here the high frequency words from TV (blue) show significant difference from those appearing frequently in government sources (red) with very little overlap (purple) in high frequency words.  While this does not definitively indicate a lack of similarity in coverage (or lack of coverage) of some topics, it certainly appears to indicate that there is a fair degree of dissimilarity in the topics that are covered.  In addition to the TV coverage of the Budanov murder (which did not receive frequent mention in government sources), the TV sources for the week included more prominent discussion of Khodorkovsky, war, other countries (including Europe), and cultural items such as film and festivals.

As these last couple examples indicate, some of this dissimilarity here could have to do with non-news content in the TV news feed (or at least a broader definition of news to include things not addressed by government media sources); but, as demonstrated by the other examples of non-overlapping frequent words, it appears there also is some substantial difference in the primary news content.

It is no secret that the Arab Spring has shaken authoritarian governments not just in the Middle East, but around the world. China has engaged in a severe crackdown on dissent, including imprisoning well-known artist Ai Weiwei, and has also gone so far as to prohibit the sale of Jasmine. But what about Russia, which has left its Internet mostly open but is more similar to China in its repression of offline political action?

As I noted in my last post, the recent events in Egypt and Tunisia provide a great example of the appearance of an agenda in the Russian blogosphere that is almost completely absent from official Russian government information channels. The Russian government, it seems, didn’t know what to say, or how to say it.

The polar map above shows the similarity of Russian popular blogs, Russian top 25 most popular media, Russian TV, and the Russian Government feeds that use the terms ‘Egypt,’ ‘Tunisia’ or ‘Protest’ from December 25, 2010 to February 21, 2011 (Mubarak officially stepped down on February 11). The center node on this map (black) is our list of Top 25 Russian mainstream or popular media. The further a given source is from this center node, the more dissimilar it is to the collective content of the mainstream media. (I would have preferred to use the government as the center node, but the lack of data from the government on this specific query made that impossible. So what we really are looking at in the above polar map is the comparison of mainstream media to blogs, and the absence of the Russian government.)

It is clear in the above polar map that there is a large difference between the terms used by the majority of popular blogs compared to more traditional Russian media when discussing Egypt and the protests. Most popular mainstream media and TV channels are found near the center of the map along with a handful of popular blogs. The majority of popular blogs are pushed even further to the edge of the chart, and with a more clearly delineated white space between mainstream media and the outer ring of blogs than in the examples in my previous Media Cloud post.

The content clusters (the color of a given node on the map and related cluster title) are also revealing. A selection of sentences from the different sources highlights how different the discussion actually is between blogs and other more traditional media. The mainstream media talk primarily about tourists. A quick reading of the first thousand sentences in this query that use the word tourists show that a clear majority of this discussion is indeed about Russian tourists trying to get out of Tunisia and Egypt, official government statements about the safety of tourists and the need to help them evacuate, and additional flights that were added to help Russian tourists return home. For example, this is a sentence from the mainstream media found in the tourist cluster:

Rosturizm [the Federal Agency for Tourism] is looking after the fate of the Russian tourists vacationing in Tunisia. A decision about the necessity of their return home, in the context of massive riots and the hasty departure of the President of Tunisia from the country, will be made on Saturday.

Traditional media such as TV Channel 5 and Izvestiya (as well as a few blogs) also use the term for riots instead of protests, which might reflect a more negative framing of events. Here are examples of MSM sentences from that cluster:

During the mass protests and ensuing riots in Egypt, 365 people have been killed and more than five thousand have been injured.

Egypt has descended into chaos and is preparing for new mass riots.

Most popular blogs are located far from the center of the map, and clustered around the terms Libya, Tunisia and sports, and also discussed the impact of the Internet on the protests. Below are illustrative sentences pulled from blogs:

I do not believe that the Russian authorities, the “tandem and company,” will take away the necessary lesson from the events in Tunisia and Egypt.

It [the Internet] is more often not used just as an information platform, but as a coordinator of this or that mass action…The revolutions in Egypt proved: social networks may be used as political instruments, and as long as access isn’t shut off, no censorship of the press will insulate authoritarian governments from mass action protests – the collective organizers of which today are Facebook and Twitter, and what is going to fill that arsenal tomorrow, it is even hard to imagine.

In light of the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, even a complete idiot can understand the repression against activists in Triumph Square, the Strategy-31 activists, which has gone on for nearly two years, and also understand the intrigue surrounding Strategy-31. [Russian Federal] authorities, similar in spirit to their fellow authoritarian regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, are scared to death of the possibilities that freedom of peaceful assembly will open for Russian citizens.

The Russian government, on the other hand, barely uses the word Egypt at all (not frequently enough to even generate a word cloud or to appear on the polar map). The government’s near silence on the political aspects of the Middle East protests ended with this televised statement by Medvedev on the 22nd of February, “These states are difficult, and it is quite probable that hard times are ahead, including the arrival at power of fanatics. This will mean fires for decades and the spread of extremism.”

Comparison to the US

A comparison of how Egypt was discussed in the US media ecosystem (including blogs) shows how different the Russian media space is to that in the United States for this topic. The US polar map is drawn with the White House as the central node and plots the content of popular blogs, political blogs, Top 25 mainstream media, and the White House over the same December to February time period as the Russia polar map. In the US, blogs are much more similar in their content to the White House than blogs in Russia are to the Kremlin, or even top 25 MSM. The content of the US blogs and mainstream media cluster primarily around the terms American and Mubarak. At first blush, this map seems to support media theories that argue the White House is the most important player in setting the media agenda, particularly in foreign affairs debates. However, it is interesting to note that there are some outliers in this map that are found further from the center. These include blog content clusters that use the terms Palin, War, Internet and Google. Below is a zoom in on the US polar map and the word cloud from the cluster of sources that most frequently use the term Palin relative to others.

Word Cloud: Palin Content Cluster

In conclusion, these first couple tests of Russian Media Cloud indicate that Russian popular blogs and opposition political blogs are the least similar to the Russian government when compared to Russian TV and popular mainstream media. Russian mainstream media are more similar to Russian TV and the Russian government than one might expect. If it is true that cosine similarity is a good automated method for identifying agendas in the different media sources we are tracking, then the similarity we observe seems to suggest that the Russian government has a significant influence on the agenda of traditional media, including Web-native media, and that blogs might provide an alternative agenda. For certain topics, such as the recent protests in the Middle East and North Africa, the difference between blog content and Russian government information channels is even more stark; the government is nearly silent on the protests, the MSM seems to have adopted the government frame of discussing ‘tourists’ and ‘riots’ more than protests, and a qualitative read of the sentences used by bloggers reinforces just how differently bloggers frame the Arab Spring compared to traditional media and the government.

Cross posted on the Media Cloud blog.