SOCIAL MEDIA IN POST-SOVIET SPACE: SERVING TO AUTOCRACY OR SIMULATING DISSENT?

On the rise of the digital era, social media promised to empower citizens in non-democratic countries by challenging the information hegemony of autocrats on the media market and facilitating citizens' coordination for civil initiative and collective action events. The first evidence endorsing the liberalising power of new technologies came from the Arab world, where in the early 2010s, several long-lasting dictators got overthrown as a consequence of digitally-enabled mass uprisings. However, autocrats across the globe quickly learnt how to embrace new media to secure their rule in the modern world and started using it for propaganda and surveillance. Although digital media might empower both regime and dissent forces, little is known about what determines either group's success in digital space. I define two dimensions along which autocrats and their rivals from the opposition might benefit from using social media: informational and mobilisation facets. In the first two articles of my paper-based dissertation, I concentrate on the informational aspect of social networks by studying online disinformation and politicians' campaigning strategies in digital space. The third paper delves into the mobilisation potential of new technologies by analysing the driving forces of digitally-enabled uprisings. I collect data from two platforms: Facebook and Telegram, and analyse it via a set of quantitative techniques: automated text analysis, time-series modelling, quasi-experimental methods and regression analysis. The empirical part of my studies concentrates on countries of the post-soviet region: Belarus, Lithuania, Russia and Ukraine. I argue that autocratic powers tend to be more efficient in the informational dimension: advance pro-goverment content even on platforms with more regime-hostile users and strategically adopt online space for political campaigning. However, opposition forces are savvier in using social media's mobilisation potential to organise people for collective action events. Although even in this dimension, autocrats might effectively monitor information generated by the dissent to identify and prosecute the incompliant citizenry. The findings contribute to the literature on mobilisation in digitally-enabled protests and challenge the idea of the secondary role of formal leadership in modern uprisings. This study also expands the research on political communication since official political campaigning by autocratic actors in electoral settings was largely unstudied. Finally, obtained results complement studies about disinformation in online space, demonstrating that pro-regime news content might dominate even on uncontrolled digital platforms and enjoy great popularity among users.