Who Sets the Agenda? Authoritarian Control of Online Political Discourse in Russia

This project examines how authoritarian regimes strategically capture online political discourse on ostensibly open social media platforms by saturating them with propaganda. Rather than relying exclusively on censorship, contemporary authoritarian governments increasingly manage public attention within digital environments that remain formally uncensored. In such settings, control is exercised not by silencing voices outright, but by shaping the volume, tone, and topical composition of information. Focusing on Russia during the Russo-Ukrainian war, the paper develops a theoretical framework of authoritarian agenda control. I argue that regimes exert influence over through two complementary mechanisms. First, agenda boosting involves intensifying the supply of regime-aligned content to crowd out alternative narratives. This operates both structurally—through the creation and co-optation of content producers—and rhetorically, through the amplification of pro-regime messaging. Second, agenda diverting, seeks to redirect public attention away from politically sensitive topics by increasing the prominence of non-political or entertainment-oriented content, thereby diluting exposure to critical or costly information without overt suppression. Together, these mechanisms allow authoritarian actors to shape what citizens see, discuss, and ignore in online spaces, even when those spaces are not directly controlled by the state. To investigate these dynamics, I assemble a large-scale original dataset of over 120 million messages posted between 2019 and 2025 on more than 14,000 politically relevant Russian-language Telegram channels. Telegram represents a particularly informative case: it remained accessible in Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, emerged as a central source of political news and commentary, and hosted both regime-aligned and opposition voices. The empirical strategy leverages the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 as a critical juncture that sharply increased the regime’s incentives to manage online discourse while leaving the platform itself formally open. Using a supervised language model fine-tuned on manually validated data, I measure the ideological orientation of millions of messages on a continuous pro- to anti-regime scale. This approach enables the analysis of changes over time in the composition, intensity, and topical focus of online political communication. I test a series of hypotheses capturing different dimensions of agenda control, including the entry of new pro-regime channels, the conversion of previously neutral outlets, the intensification of pro-regime rhetoric within incumbent channels, and systematic shifts in content away from war-related and politically sensitive topics. The analysis employs a quasi-experimental design, leveraging the invasion of Ukraine as an exogenous shock to assess structural and dynamic changes in the online information environment. The findings are designed to illuminate whether and how the Kremlin’s informational apparatus rebalanced its messaging following the invasion, including whether regime-aligned actors strategically shifted attention away from the war during moments of heightened critical discourse. By focusing on agenda control rather than censorship, this study contributes to broader debates on the adaptability of authoritarian governance in the digital age. More broadly, it clarifies how regimes can maintain dominance not only by suppressing dissent, but by structuring the distribution of attention within online political discourse—raising new questions about the political consequences of online openness under authoritarian rule.