Speaking up online when it’s costly: evidence from Russia, 2022

Repression raises the cost of protest, potentially limiting entry. Yet its effect after entry is less clear: conditional on participating under repression, do individuals disengage quickly or persist?

Twitter activity around the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine – amid repressive laws and throttled platform access – offers a useful test.

Antiwar-hashtag posts are linked to account metadata to identify likely Russia-based users. The results show a shift from breadth to depth: likely Russia-based participation is narrower (fewer active and new participants) but more persistent and intense among those who participate. The findings contribute to research on authoritarian politics, repression, and digital media in collective action.

Meet our speaker

Dr Lanabi La Lova is an Advanced Quantitative Fellow in the Department of Methodology and a Guest Lecturer in the Department of International Relations at LSE. A computational political scientist, she specialises in text-as-data and quantitative approaches to political science, with a focus on political communication, propaganda, and media systems. Her research interests include Russia, Ukraine, and the Balkans, as well as broader themes of authoritarian politics and democratic backsliding.

This seminar is part of the DSI Faculty Affiliate Research Showcase series that highlights research from across LSE in the field of Data Science and AI.

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