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Social media has become a crucial arena for political opposition in autocracies, and, in turn, autocrats have adapted by introducing costly barriers to deter citizens from political engagement online. Still, little is known about the differential effect of repression on those targeted by the repression versus those observing it.
This talk presents findings from a study that exploits the temporal variation in Russia’s “foreign agent” labelling to investigate how repression impacts political expression online in (1) the content produced by those labelled as political pariahs, and (2) user engagement with the “suspect” content. Using a quasi-experimental research design on over 200,000 YouTube videos and more than 100 million adjacent comments posted between 2014 and 2023, we find that targeted actors not only retain their online presence but also increase their level of regime criticism. In contrast, users substantially reduce their comment engagement with the targeted creators’ content. These findings indicate that regime deterrence signals can effectively stifle online engagement with politically sensitive content while simultaneously fostering political dissent.
Kristina Pedersen is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Copenhagen Business School and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics (CSMaP). Her research focuses on information control and media in autocracies, particularly in Russia, using digital and quantitative methods.
