Department of Informatics and Media Social Science – major in Media and Communication Studies Fall 2013 Master Two Years Thesis Social Media and Civil Society in the Russian Protests, December 2011 The role of social media in engagement of people in the protests and their self- identification with civil society Daria Dmitrieva Fall 2013 Supervisor: Dr. Gregory Simons Researcher at Uppsala Centre for Russian and Eurasian Studies 1 2 ABSTRACT The study examines the phenomenon of the December protests in Russia when thousands of citizens were involved in the protest movement after the frauds during the Parliamentary elections. There was a popular opinion in the Internet media that at that moment Russia experienced establishment of civil society, since so many people were ready to express their discontent publically for the first time in 20 years. The focus of this study is made on the analysis of the roles that social media played in the protest movement. As it could be observed at the first glance, recruiting and mobilising individuals to participation in the rallies were mainly conducted via social media. The research analyses the concept of civil society and its relevance to the protest rhetoric and investigates, whether there was a phenomenon of civil society indeed and how it was connected to individuals‘ motivation for joining the protest. The concept of civil society is discussed through the social capital, social and political trust, e- democracy and mediatisation frameworks. The study provides a comprehensive description of the events, based on mainstream and new media sources, in order to depict the nature and the development of the movement. The structure of the protests is analysed through the new social movement theory. Also, various approaches to engagement of people in the social movements are presentedl, including political marketing framework. The research was conducted in several main stages, using content analysis, survey and interviewing as main methods. The main conclusions of the study: relatively minor impact of social media in the engagement of people in the protest, a narrow section of the population as the audience of social media protesters (for them civil society mostly played a role of a customer need), and yet a significant potential of ICT in the future political life of the country. Key words: Russia, social media, political mobilization, democracy, public sphere, social capital, new social movements, e-democracy, political marketing, digital divide. - 3 - ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS On the first place, this research would be impossible to conduct without my supervisor Dr. Gregory Simons. I would like to thank him for his mentoring, priceless advice and for guiding me throughout the whole time of writing. I would also like to express my gratitude to Uppsala University and the programme teachers for providing a sufficient theoretical and methodological platform for the research. Also, I feel extremely grateful to my friends Valeria Sokolova, Daniel Lövgren, Andra Negus, Kasia Hellström, Danijela Jagodic, Oliver Teige, Anton Volkov and Tatiana Yermakova for their invaluable help, support, opinions and recommendations. It goes without saying that I am very thankful to my parents for their love and support. Finally, I would like to say special thanks to Carl Olsson for helping me at all the stages of the research, supporting me and being my role model in all the possible ways. - 4 - TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS ...................................................................................... 6 INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................................................................... 7 I. Theoretical background and literature review.......................................................................................... 11 1. Civil Society and Media .................................................................................................................. 12 1.1. Civil society: definition, approaches and fundamental principles ........................................... 12 1.2. Civil society and democracy via social capital framework: social vs. political trust .............. 16 1.3. Civic society and mediatisation of the state ............................................................................ 18 1.4. E-democracy............................................................................................................................ 22 1.5. The mediatisation process in Russia: changing political system – changing mediashpere ..... 24 2. Social movement goes online .......................................................................................................... 29 2.1. Literature review ..................................................................................................................... 29 2.2. Types and classifications of online social movements ............................................................ 31 2.3. ‗New Social Movements‘ framework ...................................................................................... 34 3. Engagement of young people into social media movements .......................................................... 40 3.1 Social portrait of online activists ................................................................................................... 40 3.2. Motivation of individuals for being a part of social movements .................................................. 41 4. Social media as one of channels for political marketing ................................................................. 51 5. Summary: basis for empirical research ........................................................................................... 55 III. Methodology of the study ..................................................................................................................... 58 1. Overview ......................................................................................................................................... 58 2. Representativeness, authenticity and credibility of the sources ...................................................... 60 3. Opinion polls, surveys and sociological research ........................................................................... 63 4. Online survey for collecting supplementary data ............................................................................ 65 4.1. Designing questionnaire ............................................................................................................... 65 4.2. Holding the survey ....................................................................................................................... 68 4.3. Analysis of the data from the survey ............................................................................................ 69 5. Interviews ........................................................................................................................................ 70 5.1. Interview modeling ................................................................................................................. 70 1 5.2. Interviewing ............................................................................................................................ 72 5.3. Study limitations ..................................................................................................................... 73 IV. STUDY BACKGROUND AND EMPIRICAL MATERIAL ......................................................... 75 December protests: day by day ............................................................................................................... 76 December, 4......................................................................................................................................... 76 December, 5......................................................................................................................................... 77 December, 6......................................................................................................................................... 80 Court case of Navalny ......................................................................................................................... 82 December, 7......................................................................................................................................... 83 December, 8-9 ..................................................................................................................................... 84 VK incident .......................................................................................................................................... 84 Conflict in the opposition: Twitter skirmish ........................................................................................ 85 Recommendations for protesters in social media ................................................................................ 86 Politics of Russian mainstream media before the 10th of December ................................................... 87 December, 10....................................................................................................................................... 88 Social media origin of the White Ribbon as a symbol of protest ........................................................ 89 December, 11-23 ................................................................................................................................