Social Media Behavior of the Russian Far-Right

The study analyzes the media behavior of Russian far-right online users through the conceptual lens of media ideologies. In recent years, a significant part of far-right activities worldwide has taken place on the Internet which, by allowing the radical actors to avoid traditional media gatekeepers, has become a venue for their networking, radicalization, and recruitment. The full-scale war against Ukraine led to increased repressions of all kinds of dissent, which caused many far-right activists to be more cautious in communicating online. Based on data from in-depth interviews with far-right actors and the analysis of online discourse, the study demonstrates how media ideologies function in non-democratic settings and stigmatized user cohorts and how political and media ideologies converge in hostile environments, turning technical affordances into ideologically charged resources. Far-right users have to look at the media through the prism not only of functionality but also of personal security (from state surveillance) and freedom from moderation (to maintain semi-political expression). In addition to common determinants such as liaison type and imagined audience, their communication style is defined by ideological proximity. Apart from the research findings per se, the study raises and discusses the problems of scholarly ethics while working with vulnerable research populations.

Petr Oskolkov, Ph.D., is a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Communication and at the Department of Middle Eastern Studies and Political Science, Ariel University, and an affiliated researcher at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, Bar-Ilan University, Israel. His research is focused on far-right movements, ethnic politics, and social media, with a regional focus on the “post-Soviet” countries. His most recent publications include the co-edited book Transforming the Administrative Matryoshka: The Reform of Autonomous Okrugs in the Russian Federation, 2003-2008 (ibidem/Columbia University Press, 2022) and papers published, inter alia, in Nations and Nationalism, Ethnopolitics, Europe-Asia Studies, and Social Media + Society. Previously, he has worked as an assistant professor at MGIMO University and Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia, and as a director of the Center for the Studies of Ethnic Politics at the Institute of Europe, Russian Academy of Sciences, and held fellowships at the Institute for Euro-Asian Jewish Studies, Israel, and at Yuan Ze University, Taiwan.