Vol 24, No 3 (2022): Internet and Politics

The guest editor of this issue, Sergey Volodenkov, is a recognized expert in digital political communications, manipulation and propaganda technologies in modern informational confrontations, public consciousness management, problems of national information security and hybrid wars. His editorial article presents this thematic issue dedicated to the phenomenon of digitalization of political processes and digital politics in general. The purpose of the issue is to demonstrate the achievements of Russian political scientists who develop their original approaches and work in collaboration with foreign academics in political communication studies and demonstrate the lines of the most rigorous research.

Modern state faces the need to adapt to the changing external environment, which is characterized by intensive digital technological transformations. Thus, it is important to determine how contemporary state and its power institutions adapt to digital technological transformations and identify the key risks, threats, and challenges associated with such adaptation. To do so, the authors of the article conducted a corresponding international expert study, which allowed them to determine the degree of digital technological transformations’ influence on the functioning of traditional states and their power institutions. Also, based on the integration of expert assessments, the authors identified the essential characteristics of digital technological transformations’ effect on contemporary institutions of state power. The study results concluded that the digitalization of contemporary states and their adaptation to current technological transformations is a complex and largely ambiguous set of processes. These include both political opportunities and the associated risks, threats, and challenges for both the state and its institutions, as well as directly for the civil society, which is rapidly increasing its complexity and diversity through intensive digitalization. This brings to a wide range of scenarios for forming state and political management models in the context of a rapidly emerging digital technological reality of a new type. The article proves that the adaptation of the traditional state as a management system to the technologically more complex environment is necessary to ensure the effective viability of both the state itself and its institutions.

One of the most modern currents of anarchism - crypto-anarchism - arose as a response to the global development of digital technologies and the Internet and operates exclusively within the framework of the “global web”. The paper attempts to study one of the most unusual branches of anarchist philosophy and its impact on the digital life and politics of several states. With the help of functional and comparative methods of political research, the author analyzes crypto-anarchism as part of the ideology of anarchism, the main goal of which is to find out how viable crypto-anarchism is as an independent movement. The article raises the question of whether the ideas of crypto-anarchism can be used to effectively address current socio-political problems. The theoretical basis of crypto-anarchism looks more and more relevant, as it affects the security of the individual on the Web and is aimed at fighting against widespread state control. Despite the fact that, as the study showed, cryptoanarchism as a movement does not have sufficient elaboration and influence on real politics, its deeper study can be useful for preparing political programs aimed at Internet users (which constitute around 62.5 % of the global population), as well as studying political models and their development paths using virtual simulations and virtual states (Liberland, Wirtland), which are characteristic of crypto-anarchism.

The massive spread of digital technologies has led to the transformation of practices related to communication and, in particular, political communication. The development of digital technologies in political communication results in the emergence of new participants, who can be called network actors, the perception of which by various social groups is transformed under the influence of the values shared by the communication parties. The research discusses the current state of the communications theory in the light of the digitalizing media space and the transforming humanistic values. The authors suggest applying the ideas of post-humanistic philosophy to the analysis of the problems and prospects of political communication in the context of digitalization. The purpose of the research is to study the specific features of political communication in a digital society based on an anthropocentric approach and in the context of opposing modern humanistic values to the ideas of technocratic control and management. The empirical basis of the study includes the results of two focus groups (students and senior citizens) held in St. Petersburg in the spring of 2022, where participants discussed the problems of communication between people and chatbots. It was found that although young people in general interacted more actively with chatbots, both age groups showed a favorable attitude towards chatbots and technological progress. However, in the senior age group, humanistic values manifested themselves more explicitly (the problem of a “live voice”, issues related to the emotional component of communication, and even concern for jobs that people might lose). The authors conclude about the insufficiency of the technocratic approach and the need to take into account the values of modern humanism in implementing new forms of communication with network actors.

In recent years new digital technologies have become an integral part of daily life of civilians, including their interaction with government. Trust in innovation in the government sector became the most important feature of the relations between government and civilians. The main purpose of this research is to explore how the factor of civil trust influences the implementation of digital technologies in government. We studied new phenomenon - “digital trust” and made content analysis of the main programmatic and analytical documents on the realization of the digital government concept. Based on the research results, we described the impact of the trust on the digital government effectiveness, and defined the basic principles of trust building, such as openness of the digital government system for citizens, security and reliability of electronic services, two-way communication with citizens. However, Russia lacks a clear strategy on how to build “digital trust” to government services. This circumstance could become a barrier for government’s digitalization in the future.

Abundant academic research has shown evidence of the growing polarization across the globe both in general and in terms of affective polarization. Previous research on this topic primarily employed reactive research methods like surveys or experiments, which however do not allow researchers to observe the behavior of the units of analysis in a natural setting. Presents an alternative approach that involves analyzing the observed behavior of social media users and identifying the key polarizing cleavages through the study of hate speech with respect to distinct target groups. We present a novel coding schema for textual data, which includes two components: first, an operationalized definition of hate speech as a phenomenon with at least one of the three elements - insult, discrimination, or aggression; and second, an original coding guide for human coders annotating the use of hate speech. We apply our approach to the analysis of empirical data that includes over 5000 posts on the social media platform VK about the meetings between the Presidents of Russia and Belarus in 2020-2021. After coding the collected data, we performed the empirical analysis that identified two generic cleavages. One is about domestic politics in Belarus and Russia, whereas the other is related to the opposition between these two countries on the one hand, and Western countries on the other. We also found an additional Russian/Belarusian cleavage that is peculiar to the collected dataset. Our methodology also allowed us to identify and analyze the dynamics of macro-groups that were targets of hate speech. Importantly, these results - as any other dynamic aspect of analysis - would be highly challenging in research based on reactive methods. Thereby our results highlight the prospects of applying the proposed methodology to a broad range of textual data, as well as the benefits of exploratory analysis that helps overcome the limitations of survey instruments.

The digitalization of public life modifies old phenomena. Some of these changes prove to be detrimental to certain public spheres, including politics. Digital hate speech is one of the most obvious examples of digitalization’s impact on political processes. The manifestation of hatred online became an urgent challenge to political systems globally. In this respect, a theoretical and practical elaboration is necessary to counter the new threat. This study aims to identify the social mechanisms that make hate speech an instrument in information campaigns. The article illustrates the discursive and emotional aspects of the public manifestation of hatred. The theoretical basis of this work is the theory of “emotional regimes” and the concept of “regimes of truth”, which express the mutual influence of subjectivity and public discourse. Comparing the theoretical framework with the practical aspects of hate speech demonstrates that digital platforms and social networks form an environment that accelerates and facilitates the dissemination of hatred in the public space. As a result, various forms of hatred are accepted as a new social norm, which leads to such phenomena as harassment, humiliation, or even physical persecution. The modern technical reality allows to instrumentalize hate speech for manipulation, which results in three main scenarios for social impact: 1) large impact with low personalization; 2) targeted impact with high personalization; 3) broad and decentralized targeted impact using artificial intelligence. While countering each of these scenarios, a key challenge is to combine long-term and specialized measures.

The article presents the results of an applied political research on the representation of the 2022 Kazakh events in the Russian segment of social media. The context of the study stems from the significant intersection of the Russian and Kazakh segments of social media and the mutual influence of political processes. Under the political mobilization of the mass protests in Kazakhstan, which turned into an attempted coup, the activities of Russian counterelites intensified in various regions of Russia. Using a hybrid research strategy combined with cognitive mapping and social media analysis the authors managed to identify dynamic, structural and substantive characteristics of the information representation of the Kazakh events in the Russian segment of the Internet. The authors concluded that the scale of the Kazakh protests allowed to draw the short-term interest of the Russian audience, mainly from the regions bordering Kazakhstan. The use of economic triggers (rising prices, inefficient social policy, etc.) led to the involvement of the adult audience in the discussions around the Kazakh events, while a significant part of youth and young adults was excluded from information flows around the events. The study revealed that the Russian opposition attempted to use manipulative “contamination” technology in order to extrapolate the political and economic discontent in Kazakhstan to the situation in Russia. At the same time, the greatest resonance in the Russian segment of users was caused directly by the participation of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) in the settlement, and not by the social and economic triggers that led to the events.

The early ideological socialization of schoolchildren is manifested in their increasing involvement in political (including protest) activities. In Russia, school students’ involvement in political processes hasn’t been properly studied, despite similar studies being conducted abroad since the middle of the last century. Meanwhile, in the information age, the students’ political participation should be considered in close connection with the younger generation’s digital socialization carried out in online communities and social networks. In this regard, the purpose of this article is to raise the question of the methodology for studying what until recently seemed insignificant in the minds of schoolchildren: fully formed ideological attitudes influenced by the ideological language of new media. To solve this methodological problem, we need to clarify the concepts of political and ideological socialization projected on the school; formulate the problem of ideological acceleration of schoolchildren; methodologically substantiate the concept of ideological socialization and describe the environment of new media as the main “accelerator” of the schoolchildren’s ideological socialization. The authors note the need for a political study of the issue, using the achievements of interdisciplinary research in the fields of linguistics, cognitive science and ideologies. They propose an approach based on the theory of metaphorical framing (J. Lakoff) and the authors’ concept of cognitive ideological matrices. The authors emphasize that new media act as an intermediary in the formation of cognitiveideological matrices in the individual and group consciousness of schoolchildren, as well as a catalyst for earlier ideological socialization.