Punished for Expressing Online Disagreement with Political Leadership? Civic Participation and Deliberation on Social Media During the Covid-19 Pandemic in Russia

This study examines the patterns of (dis)agreement between Russian citizens and authorities concerning policy measures during the Covid-19 pandemic. It also aims to understand what communicative tools Russian political leadership employed in online spaces to soften social tensions. The analysis focuses on how citizens and government interacted in e-deliberation and how disagreement with public policy was managed. Theoretically, the research draws upon several concepts, including theories of democratic, authoritarian, and cumulative deliberation, Habermas’s notion of the public sphere and theory of the authoritarian public. Methodologically, the study employs content analysis of online conversations between citizens and authorities. It examines key dimensions such as participation activity, inclusiveness, and the dynamics of (dis)agreement. Empirical data were collected from the official social media accounts (VK.com) of 3 government structures: (1) the Russian Government’s portal Stopcoronavirus.RF, (2) Rospotrebnadzor, and (3) the Russian representative office of the World Health Organization. The dataset includes a total of 29,294 comments posted by both citizens and authorities between March 2020 and February 2023. The study found that the Covid-19 crisis did not provoke a noticeable increase in disagreement between citizens and Russian authorities or their policies on government social media platforms. The most frequent category of disagreement observed in online discussions was citizen-citizen disagreement, whereas citizen-authority disagreement was the least frequent category. This suggests that, during the pandemic, online discourse on state platforms was characterized by a predominance of consensus-oriented or neutral exchanges rather than overt confrontation with power holders. The research identified two principal mechanisms used by Russian authorities to manage citizens’ disagreement online. First, a deliberative mode marked by polite, reasoned, and respectful responses from official accounts appeared to soften dissent and sustain legitimacy. Second, a non-deliberative mode including denial of access to commenting, deletion or moderation of comments, and blocking of users for violating community rules functioned as an instrument of discursive control. The findings reveal that the deliberative approach was used selectively by Russian authorities, primarily, to eliminate disagreement among citizens regarding policy measures or to maintain consensus among those already supportive of policy. This hybrid strategy combined deliberative discourse, aimed at legitimizing policy and managing public disagreement, with restrictive measures limiting digital participation such as closing and deleting comments, user blocking.