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Russian Political Astroturfing As an Ideological Manifestation of The Rewriting knowledge: Russian Political Astroturfing as an Ideological Manifestation of the National Role Conceptions Elena Labzina Departments of Political Science and Mathematics Washington University in St. Louis December 6, 2017 PRELIMINARY DRAFT PLEASE DO NOT DISTRIBUTE Abstract As the most implicit part of online censorship, political astroturfing imposes con- siderable difficulties in terms of study because of identification challenges posed by its nature of concealment. Consequently, while being a prominent factor in today's online political discourse, it is still vastly under-investigated. In particular, one perspective completely overlooked so far is how authoritarian regimes may use it to manifest their ideology and national role conceptions. This paper studies the behavior of the most developed and institutionalized \political trolls" in the world - the Russian ones - on the largest collaborative knowledge network, Wikipedia. The paper employs a mixed- methods approach that combines Big Data and other qualitative methodology. First, making use of Wikipedia's unique knowledge-centered structure, which distinguishes it from other popular online social networks, this work utilizes a novel strategy to identify political astroturfing by including the available geographical information in the anal- ysis. Second, the conclusive findings of the following qualitative investigation affirm the existence of political astroturfing on the Russian Wikipedia and that its essential function stems from current Russian regime's self-perception. Third, the study also looks for similar contributions from \genuine" people who happen to share parallel views with the Russian regime but who are not formally associated with it. Substan- tively, this work concludes that \a peaceful regional integrator" is the national role conception that best corresponds to the content produced by both identified political trolls and their \genuine" accomplices. Keywords: Political Astroturfing, Textual Analysis, Big Data 1 Political Astroturfing and National Role Conceptions (NRCs) On October 17, the Russian magazine RBC released a new investigation about the Russian political trolls' efforts to influence US politics (RBC(2017), Meduza(2017)). This article argues that the infamously known \Internet Research Agency", the main quarters of which are located in Saint Petersburg, Russia, not only attempted to influence the American presidential elections in 2016, but also significantly contributed to the organization of civil unrest in Charlottesville in August 2017. Consequently, the impact of the Russian political trolls has truly grown to become an international phenomenon and their existence is impos- sible to ignore. Indeed, their \international network" constitutes less than half of its total constituents. The majority of the political trolls still targets the domestic social media in Russia. There is no doubt that political trolls are now an integral players who shape modern Russian politics. This paper argues that, as a somewhat surprising conclusion, the content of their contributions may provide a novel insight into the regime's identity and its desired vision for the past and future of Russia. This paper looks at a particular form of online political astroturfing: an Internet cam- paign performed by a government in order to influence public opinion. It is organized by hiring individuals or programming bots who can mimic regular users that comment on social media or public opinion networks (Keller et al.(2017)). While being a prominent factor of today's political online discourse, political astroturfing is vastly under-investigated. In particular, one perspective completely overlooked so far is whether and how authoritarian regimes national role conceptions (NRC) through political astroturfing. NRCs describe how regimes perceive their self-assigned specific roles and identities. They capture the social and psychological motivations of the regimes that may be completely neglected in the rational analysis based on power incentives that are projected in current events. As Thies and Nie- man(2017) state in their upcoming book, \role conceptions ... refer to the expectations page 2 about a role held by a country (or at least its leaders)". In the case of modern Russia, these \self-expectations" are far less than obvious. So why are they important to under- stand? One main reason is that NRCs, especially in the case of Russia (Thies and Nieman (2017)), greatly influence the outcomes of a country's foreign policy, hence they have direct policy and diplomatic implications. This work argues that political astroturfing may carry an essential and unexpected element of the regime's self-perception in a significantly broader sense than the current politics and, hence, provides a potential fruitful source for the study of the NRCs. While many researchers (Sanovich, Stukal and Tucker(2017), Hegelich and Janetzko (2016)) study bot online users, this paper is primarily interested in the human contributors to the Russian astroturfing campaign. In the case of the human contributors, political astroturfing imposes considerable difficulties in terms of investigation and research because of the identification obstacles that make it challenging to differentiate between false and genuine regime supporters. The paper further proposes a novel strategy that would employ the available geographical information to investigate the behavior of the most institutionalized political trolls of the modern world in a unique environment of the most prominent knowledge network on the Russian Internet - the Wikipedia. Perceived as an unbiased general knowledge source on the Russian language domain, it presents an ideal space for the study of political astroturfing in the context of NRCs, since Wikipedia covers a comprehensive set of topics, in contrast to conventional social networks or political blogs where the discussion mainly centers on how recent political events may influence the perception of related historical events. Indeed, the salient and ever-changing nature of political discourse can translate to a historical salience of reality. This is a critical implication in terms of the agenda-based perception formation of the general public as well as the role of political trolls in perpetuating it. As Labzina and Nieman(2017) show, autocratic regimes portray themselves and others based on their pre-existing NRC with the aid of the state-controlled media. They emphasize that regimes may use controlled media to raise political salience and awareness in the desired page 3 direction. This paper argues that political astroturfing can likewise be viewed as a political message, and analyzing its role in the framework of Wikipedia enables Labzina and Neiman's argument to be placed in a broader perspective. This research further uncovers that the \conservative" { free of any controversial or incriminating content { perspective on the country's history is the Russian regime's main approach to formulating its desired NRC. The identified instances of astroturfing are most consistent with the Russian historical role of \regional integrator" and, to a less extent, \defender of the faith" (see Figure1 for all roles). This evidence shows that the current NRC rejects the grim or controversial pages of the country's history, such as genocides, bloodshed or the appeals of Moscow's \colonies" for more independence. This corresponds to the notion of a imperial Russia, or so-called \Russian World", which is a rather controversial concept. The politically neutral understanding of \Russian World" is inclusive of all the lands and territories historically united by Russian language and culture. However, especially in the context of the military conflict in the Eastern Ukraine after the Ukrainian Revolution in 2014, it is often associated with the geopolitical intentions of the Russian political elite that seek to dominate currently independent countries of the former Soviet Union { which they view as the glorious Russian Empire { where a significant share of the Russian speaking population still resides. Obviously, the fact that Russia explicitly views these territories as spheres of its influence is not new. Meanwhile, a decade ago, as Trenin(2009) writes, \the regime seemed to have only interest and not influence in these territories." This situation was unsatisfactory for the Russian leadership, especially given the unsteady popularity of Putin after the previous presidential elections in 2012. Hence, the recent geopolitical moves of Russia are highly likely aimed to reclaim its role as a regional leader, primarily ideologically, and to increase the perceived domestic legitimacy of the regime. Within this context, this paper aims to obtain a new insight into the national role conceptions that the regime proposes to its domestic audience. This research does it by analyzing the unique content of political astroturfing. page 4 1.1 Plan and research questions This work employs a mixed-methods approach by combining Big Data analysis and careful substantive evaluation. It begins by introducing the Wikipedia platform and justify- ing its relevance under the conditions of political salience, especially in the context of recent Russian political affairs. The next section starts with the description of the existing evidence of \the troll centers" in order to establish familiarity with the background of the topic of Russian political astroturfing in its domestic context. Then, the text proceeds to explain how select Wikipedia contributions may be linked
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