Turning the Virtual Tables: Government Strategies for Addressing Online Opposition with an Application to Russia

Joshua Tucker and his colleagues have introduced a novel classification of strategies employed by autocrats to combat hostile activity on the web and in social media in particular. Their classification looks at these options from the point of view of the end internet user and distinguishes online from offline response and exerting control from engaging in opinion formation. For each of the three options - offline action, infrastructure regulation and online engagement - they provide a detailed account for the evolution of Russian government strategy since 2000. In addition, for online engagement option they construct the tools for detecting such activity on Twitter and test them on a large dataset of politically relevant Twitter data from Russia, gathered over the period of nine month in 2014.