A place to rally around the flag or hub of subversive information: Telegram during Russo - Ukrainian war

Can social media challenge the information hegemony of autocratic regimes? Under specific scenarios, social networks might serve as a communication platform that autocrats use to manipulate public opinion, but under other new media enhances opposition movements and facilitate the dissemination of regime-critical content. In the context of the Russo-Ukrainian war, the common understanding presumes that digital media in Russia became an ultimate source of alternative news coverage and uncensored information. Yet little systematic empirical evidence exists to support this claim, and as this study shows, such assumption might be misleading. This article contributes to the online disinformation literature examining Russian propaganda during the Russo-Ukrainian war on Telegram - the platform becoming particularly relevant for political communication in Post-Soviet states. Based on the available literature, I educe two alternative strategies which Kremlin loyal actors could employ to co-opt digital space: distraction and pro-regime agenda boosting. The first assumes strategic placement of entertaining or other innocuous information to distract social media users from negative news coverage. The second reminds logic of traditional propaganda and consists in flooding the online space with pro-regime content. To proceed with the empirical test of the outlined strategies, I identify prominent Russian-speaking Telegram channels in the categories of news and entertainment (6000 channels overall) and then collect all messages published by them as well as data about its subscribers' level by day for three months before and after the beginning of the conflict. To control for the presence of the distractive strategy, I compare the volume of entertainment and news content in collected channels and check how it changed with the war's start, using nonparametric hypothesis testing and interrupted times series (ITS) methods. To test the agenda-boosting strategy, I use automated text analysis to classify news channels into anti and pro-regime categories and then examine each group's dynamic of content posting in a similar manner (nonparametric test and ITS). This provides preliminary insights into whether and to which extent autocratic actors could manipulate information in the digital space. After that, I investigate the demand side of Russian-speaking Telegram, that is, which content received more attention from the platform audience and if invasion altered existing preferences. The obtained results indicate that war turned Telegram into a news hub - the volume of news content and its audience skyrocketed in the post-invasion period, compared to a slight change in the volume and audience of entertainment channels. However, pro-regime news coverage strongly dominated the platform and had a significantly greater subscriber base. Thus, the share of anti-regime accounts was eight times smaller than pro-government channels, even though the dissent audience tended to engage more with the published content.