Fighting Propaganda with Censorship: A Study of the Ukrainian Ban on Russian Social Media
Publikation: Bidrag til tidsskrift › Tidsskriftartikel › Forskning › fagfællebedømt
Many states have become concerned with Russian cyberattacks and online propaganda. The Ukrainian government responded to the information threat in 2017 by blocking access to several Russian websites, including VKontakte, one of the most popular social media websites in Ukraine. By exploiting a natural experiment in Ukraine, I find that the sudden censorship policy reduced activity on VKontakte, despite the fact that a vast majority of the users were legally and technically able to bypass the ban. Users with strong political and social affiliations to Russia were at least as likely to be affected by the ban as those with weak affiliations. I argue that the ease of access to online media—not political attitudes toward the state—was the main mechanism behind the users’ response to the ban. These findings suggest that this pragmatic view on the effects of censorship holds, even in the highly politicized military conflict between Russia and Ukraine, which later evolved into a full-scale Russian invasion.
Originalsprog | Engelsk |
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Tidsskrift | Journal of Politics |
Vol/bind | 84 |
Udgave nummer | 2 |
Sider (fra-til) | 639-654 |
Antal sider | 16 |
ISSN | 0022-3816 |
DOI | |
Status | Udgivet - 2022 |
Bibliografisk note
Funding Information:
This work is part of the Digital Disinformation and DIPLOFACE research projects, both led by Rebecca Adler-Nissen. The former project (number CF16-0012) is funded by the Carlsberg Foundation, while the latter project (number 680102) is funded by the European Research Council. The use of data was approved by the University of Copenhagen. This project does not publish the data about VKontakte users because of the website’s terms of service. The code used for the analysis and data collection from VKontakte’s public application programming interface and replication files are available in the JOP Dataverse (https:// dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/jop). The empirical analysis has been successfully replicated by the JOP replication analyst. An online appendix with supplementary material is available at https://doi.org/10.1086/716949.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Southern Political Science Association. All rights reserved.
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