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.

–Interview by Josh Tapper, Nieman Journalism Lab

In the above quote, Elena Vartanova echos two key research questions we have for Russian Media Cloud:

1. Do blogs and other online media provide an alternative public sphere, and;
2. What role do they play in agenda setting of the news.

To begin to test these hypotheses we have built off the hard work by Ethan Zuckerman, Hal Roberts, David Larochelle, Yochi Benkler and Zoe Fraade-Blanar on English Media Cloud, which collects data on different sets of English language blogs and popular traditional media available online (mostly newspapers). For the Russia effort we have an even larger and more varied set of feeds, including:

1. 1000 popular Russian blogs: The Yandex Top 1000 list

2. Over 11,000 Russian language blogs divided into link-based attentive clusters, based on the results of our previous Russian blog research

3. 1000 random, or long tail, blogs based on our own spider of the Russian blogosphere

4. Top 25 ‘mainstream media’: This is currently the Google Ad Planner list of the top 25 most popular news Web sites in Russia, which we filtered to remove sites any sites that are not news related or not primarily about Russia (*See list at bottom of this post)

5. Russian TV news feeds from: Channel 1, Vesti, REN TV, TV Tsentra, NTV, Channel 5, Mir, Zvezda, and TV Stolitsa

6. Russian government Web sites: President Medvedev’s official site, Putin’s official site, the Russian government portal government.ru, and sites of the Ministry of Emergency Situations, Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Defense, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Using the same method as Ethan describes in his blog post on calculating cosine similarity among sources and sets of sources, we are able to draw a visual map that shows how similar these different sets of feeds are to one another, based on content (as opposed to links). What this method allows us to do, and what we have done with all of the below examples, is compare the similarity of bags of words in different media sets. Media Cloud outputs alone do not say anything about the meaning behind those differences between different sources. However, with additional context about what we know of the political situation and media ownership in Russia, as well qualitative analysis of sentences within queries, we can begin to hypothesize about the possible meaning behind similarity scores, word clouds, polar maps and other automated outputs.

As Ethan writes about cosine similarity:

This is a technique computer scientists use to detect a type of similarity between documents. Basically, a computer program counts the appearances of words in a document (in this case, a week’s worth of media coverage by 25 outlets) and compares that frequency list to that of another document. If those documents are identical in word frequency – both mention Obama 23 times, Libya 5 times and basketball twice – they score a 1. If they’ve got no words in common, they score a zero.

(The actual math behind this is wonderfully cool, if slightly mind-bending. Imagine a set of documents with only two words in them – “Obama” and “NCAA”. In source A, Obama is mentioned 8 times, NCAA 2 times. Put a point on a graph at (8,2) – Obama’s our X axis, NCAA our Y axis, and draw a line that passes through 0,0 and 8,2 – that’s the vector that represents set A. In source B, Obama gets mentioned twice, NCAA 8 times – put the point at 2,8 and draw the vector for source B. The angle between vectors A and B is a measure of how similar the sets are, and taking the cosine of that angle is a simple way to scale the value to be between 0 and 1 for angles between 0 and 90 degrees. The trick, of course, is that documents contain words other than Obama and NCAA, and cosine similarity adds a new dimension to our graph for each new term. So the vectors we’re measuring when we compare all the words in 25 media sources over a week to another comparable week exist in 3000-dimensional space. Don’t bother imagining 3000-dimensional space – it will make your head hurt. Just imagine three dimensional space and think about two vectors that each emerge from 0,0,0 and each pass through an arbitrary point in positive x,y,z space – it’s easy enough to imagine measuring the angle between those two vectors. Then take it on faith that, mathematically, you can do the same thing in many-dimensional space.)

Popular Blogs Compared to the Government and Traditional Media

As a first test of whether blogs are different than Russian traditional media and government information channels, in the first polar map we compare the similarity of the Yandex Top 1000 popular blogs compared to the Russian government, TV news transcripts, and top 25 MSM over the period of December 15, 2010 to February 21, 2011. The center node, or pole around which the map is drawn, is the collective content of Russian government feeds over that same time period. The further a source is from the black dot in the center, the more different it is from Russian government feeds. What we see at first glance from this map is that, although fairly overwhelming because of their large number, most blogs are located near the outer ring of this map, while the government, MSM and TV sources are located more closely to the center of the map, showing that the media are more similar to the government than most blogs. This is probably at least in part due to the fact that Russian popular blogs are not focused exclusively on politics, which we see from the content clustering (color) process.

Polar Map

Center Node: Russian Government

The color (and related title) of the nodes is determined by a slightly different process than the location (polar mapping) one. The clustering process is agnostic to the source of the feed, and splits the individual sources into different clusters based on the similarity of words that each uses in a given query made by researchers. The clustering engine uses a simple kmeans implementation based on the cosine similarity of the list of the top 100 non-stopword query words of each media source. This approach returns a different, randomized solution each time, so we run clustering about 20 times and keep the clustering run with the highest sum of total similarity for each cluster. The title of the cluster is the most popular word within the cluster that is ranked lower than that word for all clusters (so if three clusters all have ‘Russia’ as the most popular word, none of them can use ‘Russia’ as the cluster title).

The main clusters that emerge from this query are Film (green), Russia (tan/light orange), Photograph (orange), Site (light blue), and Russian (dark blue). The Russian government, TV and MSM are primarily still found near the center of the map (which is centered around the Russian government feeds), and most of the nodes are colored tan, which represents the “Russia” cluster. Although fairly overwhelming because of their numbers, we see most all of the blogs are located near the outer ring of this map, as in the previous polar maps. This is probably at least in part due to the fact that Russian popular blogs are not focused exclusively on politics.

The color (and related title) of the nodes is determined by a slightly different process than the location (polar mapping) one. The clustering process is agnostic to the source of the feed, and splits the individual sources into different clusters based on the similarity of words that each uses in a given query made by researchers. The clustering engine uses a simple kmeans implementation based on the cosine similarity of the list of the top 100 non-stopword query words of each media source. This approach returns a different, randomized solution each time, so we run clustering about 20 times and keep the clustering run with the highest sum of total similarity for each cluster. The title of the cluster is the most popular word within the cluster that is ranked lower than that word for all clusters (so if three clusters all have ‘Russia’ as the most popular word, none of them can use ‘Russia’ as the cluster title).

The main clusters that emerge from this query are Film (green), Russia (tan/light orange), Photograph (orange), Site (light blue), and Russian (dark blue). The Russian government, TV and MSM are primarily still found near the center of the map (which is centered around the Russian government feeds), and most of the nodes are colored tan, which represents the “Russia” cluster. Although fairly overwhelming because of their numbers, we see most all of the blogs are located near the outer ring of this map, as in the other polar maps.

Oppositional Political Blogs

In the next experiment, we focused just on known political blogs (that we identified in our previous blog research, based on links), to see how different political blogs are from the government and more traditional media sources. In the below polar map, we mapped the similarity of the content in Russian democratic blogs, Russian nationalist blogs, Top 25 mainstream media, Russian TV channels and Russian government Web sites, all compared to how similar they are to the Russian government feeds. The center node, or pole around which the map is drawn, is the collective content of Russian government feeds over a two-month period (in this case, from November 29, 2010 to January 31, 2011.) Again, the further a source is from the black dot in the center, the less similar it is to Russian government feeds.

Center Node: Russian Government
1. Kremlin.ru (Kremlin Web site)
2. Government.ru (Government of Russia Portal)
3. Premier.ru (Vladimir Putin’s Web site)

On the map we see that Russian political blogs on both extremes of the Russian opposition (nationalist and democratic) are the least similar to the Russian government and located in a zone almost completely separated from traditional and online news sources. TV and popular mainstream media are found close to center of the map, and also typically blue in color. The content clusters in this clustering run are ‘crowd,’ ‘Russian (russkaya),’ country, ‘Russian (rossiskaya)’ and a very small cluster around the term ‘happy.’

An example of a democratic opposition blog is that of the Strategy 31 movement, which attempts to organize protests against the government on the 31st of each month that has 31 days, and is located in the outer ring of the map. In the above map we’ve also highlighted a typical nationalist blog. The two word clouds below show the terms used most often by each. The Strategy 31 blog preferentially uses the terms ‘freedom,’ ‘constitution’ and ‘rally (miting).’ The blog from the nationalist cluster includes nationalist language (e.g., using the word Rossiyankovo instead of Rossiskovo), as well as Chechens, Tadzhiks, Pay, Lenin, and Domodevo (the airport where a bombing blamed on Chechens took place).

Word Cloud: Democratic Opposition Blog

Popular words in a democratic opposition blog: Strategy, rally, gathering, Triumfal’noi, freedom, constitution, Nemtsov (an opposition politician arrested at a political protest)

Word Cloud: Nationalist Blog

Popular words in a nationalist blog include: Lenin, Domodedovo, Russian (Rossiyanskovo), Tadzhik, Chechen, Kavkaz, and pay

As one would expect, Russian government Web sites such as Kremlin.ru and Premier.ru are very close to the center. The official Russian government newspaper, Rossiskaya Gazeta, is the newspaper that is most similar to the government.

As one would expect, Russian government Web sites such as Kremlin.ru and Premier.ru are very close to the center. The official Russian government newspaper, Rossiskaya Gazeta, is the newspaper that is most similar to the government.

It is surprising that TV channels are not that different from other news media according to our data. One would have expected TV to be closer to the Russian government than they are based on known ownership and editorial influence over TV channels, and for other online and offline newspapers to be further from the center than Russian TV. It is quite surprising to see Channel 1 as far from the center as it is, but looking at the stories coming through news feed, it seems that this is likely due to a fair number of advertisements for entertainment and other programming highlights on the channel not related to political or other news that are included in its ‘news feed.’ It is worth further investigation to see if our other news feeds capture similar promotional material for non-hard-news stories.

Among the government Web sites, the Ministry of Defense is the least similar to the collective government feeds, while the official Kremlin Web site (primarily about Medvedev) and the official Russian government Web portal Government.ru appear to be the most similar to all government feeds.

The mainstream news sites that are the least similar to the government are 3dnews (by a long shot, it is found in the outer blog ring) and Cnews.ru, which is explained by the heavy technology news for both sites instead of a Russian politics focus. The most similar TV channels to the government are TV Tsentra and Zvezda, a Russian military channel.

Further, we also see that clustering in this map according to content shows that the mainstream media and TV sources are all clustered together in dark blue. And the word frequency cloud also shows that this group is highly focused on Russian government and politics, with ‘Russia,’ ‘President,’ ‘government’ and ‘Putin’ among the most frequently used words.

These early findings seem to indicate that, for whatever reason, Russian TV channels and newspapers (traditional and Web native) cover topics similar to each other and to the Russian government. It will require more research to understand why this might be the case. However, a few theories are possible. This may also be a reflection of the dominance of two individuals over Russian politics, Medvedev and Putin. As the only two people whose decisions really matter in politics these may be the only political stories that ever get covered. However, it may be support for the theory of US media scholar Robert Entman, who argues that in the US the White House sets the news agenda, especially regarding international affairs, and Lance Bennett, who argues that the media simply index opinion of elites, including government elites, as well as the more general theories around media gatekeepers. This effect may be amplified in semi-authoritarian settings like Russia where sources of power and authority are more limited than in liberal democracies. It is also possible that we are detecting some level of self-censorship or even bias in the traditional media, caused by concerns over upsetting the Kremlin. Again, our research cannot yet say why traditional media are so similar to Russian government official information channels, simply that they are similar in the words they use, and we infer from that the stories that they cover.

We are currently exploring if using word frequency counts are a good way of measuring the agenda of a given media set (what that set or individual media sources talk about). However, even if they are, this will likely not tell us what frame a given source employs (how they talk about a given issue). So, just because they both frequently talk about Putin and Medvedev, does not necessarily mean they are talking about him in the same way, which would require human coding of blog posts or automated sentiment analysis.

Still, it seems that based on this early output from Russian media cloud that opposition blogs are indeed different from both government information channels and popular media, and that they are likely providing an alternative agenda to mainstream sources. More research is required to understand how these different sources talk about the same topic, and if blogs in any way have a different agenda than other media. The recent events in Egypt provide an excellent example of the appearance of an agenda item in the blogosphere that is almost completely absent from official Russian government information channels. That will be the focus of my next Media Cloud post.

Cross posted on the Media Cloud blog

*”Top 25 Mainstream Media” Currently in Media Cloud (We are updating this list based on analysis of additional rankings of Russia media besides Google Ad Planner)
RIA Novosti
Komsomolskaya Pravda
lenta.ru
gazeta.ru
3D News
Regnum
Vzglad
Newsru
Svobodnaya Pressa
Inosmi
Vedomosti
Argumenti i Fakti
Rossiskaya Gazeta
Pravda
Cnews
Dni.ru
Rosbalt
Interfax
Kommersant
Moskovskii Komsomolets
expert.ru
Izvestiya
bfm.ru
Trud
fontanka.ru

Let your Russian friends and colleagues know that we’ve just released the full Russian translation of our paper (pdf), “Public Discourse in the Russian Blogosphere: Mapping RuNet Politics and Mobilization.” Accompanying the release is a very nice summary and additional commentary on the role of blogs in Russia by project team members Gregory Asmolov and Karina Alexanyan that is available on Ivan Zassoursky’s excellent Web site Chastnyi Korrespondent (which our research shows is a top outlink for Russian bloggers). Gregory and Karina have some new analysis and additional blog maps not found in the original paper, so if you read Russian it is well worth checking out. We are turning our focus next to Twitter in Russia and have nearly completed an update crawl of Russian tweets, John Kelly has created an alpha Twitter map, and we hope to release a working paper in the spring. The Russian version of Media Cloud is also up and running and we hope to begin blogging some of our early finding from that tool in the next couple weeks, so check back here often for additional research on the role of the Internet in Russia.

First, John Kelly, Robert Faris, John Palfrey and I adapted of our earlier Arabic blogosphere case study into a journal article, “Mapping the Arabic Blogosphere: Politics and Dissent Online,” which appears in the 2010 issue of New Media & Society. You can download the pdf (here) (available online as of December 21, 2010). In that article we focus on the political aspects of the Arabic blogosphere and evaluate whether it meets the conditions for a networked public sphere, as defined by Yochai Benkler.

We also wrote a short think piece on online organizing that was published this month in the SAIS Review of International Affairs. Here is the abstract from the paper, “Political Change in the Digital Age: The Fragility and Promise of Online Organizing:”

In this paper, we discuss the possible impact of digital technologies in authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes. We conclude that policymakers and scholars that have been most optimistic about the impact of digital tools have over-emphasized the role of information, specifically access to alternative and independent sources of information and unfiltered access to the Internet. We argue, in contrast, that more attention should be paid to the means of overcoming the difficulties of online organization in the face of authoritarian governments in an increasingly digital geopolitical environment.

If that’s not enough to satisfy your loved ones’ reading habits during the darkest days of the year, my colleagues here at Berkman (Ethan Zuckerman, Hal Roberts, Ryan McGrady, Jillian York and John Palfrey) released this week an excellent study on DDOS attacks against human rights groups and independent media, and I also just discovered that Berkman Fellow Clay Shirky has a smart, balanced essay out in Foreign Affairs, “The Political Power of Social Media.”

Check ‘em out. I hear several appear somewhere in print form as well.