Sparking debate? Political deaths and Twitter discourses in Argentina and Russia

ABSTRACT

The big question that pervades debate between techno-optimists and their detractors is whether social media are good for democracy. Do they help to produce or accelerate democratic change or, alternatively, might they hinder it? This article foregrounds an alternative perspective, arguing that individual social networking applications likely do not fulfil a single political function across national contexts. Their functionality may be mediated instead by language and by pre-existing relationships between the state and offline domestic media. We arrive at this conclusion through examining reactions on Twitter to two fatal events that occurred in early 2015: the death in suspicious and politically charged circumstances of the special prosecutor Alberto Nisman in Argentina, and the murder in Russia of opposition activist Boris Nemtsov. Several similarities between the two deaths provide the conditions for a comparative analysis of the discourses around them in the Spanish-language and Russian-language Twitter spheres, respectively. In Russia, a hostile social media environment polluted by high levels of automated content and other spam reduced the utility of Twitter for opposition voices, who work against an increasingly authoritarian state. In Argentina, a third-wave democracy, Twitter discourses appeared as predominantly coextensive with other pro-government and opposition online, print, and broadcast information and opinion sources, thus consolidating and amplifying a highly polarized and repetitive wider public political conversation. Despite the potential for social media to help citizens circumvent formal and informal restrictions to discursive participation in national public spheres, in the cases that we compare here domestic political structures play a key role in determining the uses and limitations of online spaces for recounting and expressing opinion on current affairs stories involving the state.

KEYWORDS:

• Political murder
• democratization
• opposition
• automation
• Twitter
• Boris Nemtsov
• Alberto Nisman
• multilingual content analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Tanya Filer is a Research Associate on the Leverhulme Trust Conspiracy and Democracy Project at the University of Cambridge. Her recent work focuses Latin American politics and contemporary history. Research interests include democratisation, political secrecy, the public sphere and the effects of digital technologies on populist regimes and democratic politics. She has published research, reviews and translations and teaches Latin American political thought, history and culture at the University of Cambridge. [email: [email protected]]

Rolf Fredheim is a Research Associate on the Leverhulme-funded research project ‘Conspiracy and Democracy’, hosted at the University of Cambridge. His research draws on quantitative methods and large data sets to analyse political discourse. Research interests include Russian politics, automated content analysis, and modelling information flow on social media. He has taught Digital Data Collection at the University of Cambridge and has published in journals such as Digital Icons, Europe-Asia Studies, and the Journal for Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society. [email: [email protected]]

Notes

1. Most of the literature that looks at ‘events’ outside the English world still focuses on English-language content.

2. Phillips (2015, p. 119) makes the argument about Internet users in general.

3. On the failure of presidential candidate (and former president) Carlos Menem's online strategy in 2003, see Fernández (2008, p. 26).

4. Search used for Nemtsov: #немцов OR #немцова; for Nisman: #nisman. Searchers are not case sensitive.

5. Spanish- and Russian-language content may of course originate from non-Argentine and Russian accounts.

6. Whether or not the account is in fact fake is of secondary importance here; we were just looking at the persona projected by the user.

7. We discuss the diversity of these accounts in greater detail elsewhere: Forthcoming.

8. For an example of the sort of clusters we identified, see Appendix which shows one cluster of bots created in mid-September 2014.