If you're Russian and engaging with even remotely political content, using Facebook, Twitter or YouTube is incredibly frustrating these days. Bot and troll infestation has reached 2014-2015 levels, when Russia was engaged in an all-out conventional and propaganda war with neighbouring Ukraine and the rest of the world. But, curiously enough, thousands of bots and hours of propaganda videos on YouTube and social media aren't so much promoting Vladimir Putin as pushing the idea of voting in general, in order to boost the turnout.
Why is the turnout so critically important this time? There is no doubt that Vladimir Putin is going into his fourth term as the Russian president after winning by an enormous margin. Other candidates on the ballot are trailing behind him in the polls with just a little over 30 per cent between the seven of them.
But simply winning isn't enough for Putin. Leaks from his close circles betray a deep sense of insecurity over his legitimacy. Back in 2016, Russian news outlets reported that the target set in the president's administration for the 2018 elections was '70/70', as in 70 per cent of votes cast for Putin at 70 per cent turnout.
And the latter turns out to be a much more elusive target. Putin is safely set to win his fourth election against seven candidates who aren't – with some notable exceptions – even pretending to oppose him. Most aren't even campaigning and are quite content with 0.2 per cent that the most generous polls give them. The one candidate who explicitly says she opposes Putin, the ultra-liberal internet darling Ksenia Sobchak, has said that she's not actually interested in winning – not that she stood a chance at two plus per cent in the polls.
This certainty of Putin's triumph is a catch-22: even his earnest loyalists couldn't be bothered to vote, because what's the point? Their candidate is winning anyway. But Putin doesn't want to be the president of the few factory workers and public servants coaxed to the polling stations by their bosses with the promise of an extra day off. He wants actual legitimacy – and that means convincing the otherwise apathetic voters to turn up at the polls.
Voter mobilisation in 2018 is unprecedented, and the internet, especially Western social media platforms, are playing a crucial role. YouTube is a particularly intense battleground, with bots furiously up-voting pro-Putin and pro-election videos and down-voting the opposition.
Last week I went on an independent political talk show, broadcast live on YouTube. Within minutes of going on air, the broadcast got at least 3,000 dislikes. Which meant the video never appeared in anyone's recommendations, it quickly sunk in the ratings and its view count stopped at 16,000 views. Before this sustained bot attack, videos from the same channel would routinely attract millions of views. The same has happened to many other videos and channels critical of Vladimir Putin or calling to boycott the March 18 presidential elections.
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The now globally infamous "troll factory" in Saint Petersburg – one of several such establishments, in fact – has also been active as ever, true to its original purpose of influencing hearts and minds domestically. Whenever you are responding to a tweet by an anti-Putin political activist or are retweeted by them, it opens a portal to an inferno of verbal abuse and threats from identically faceless accounts retweeting each other by the hundred. Critical voices are attacked as "foreign-funded saboteurs."
Instagram in Russia isn't much different from the US where 'influencers' are peddling products to millions of followers. Only in Russia the same reality show stars and beauty bloggers have all overnight turned into civic-minded voters and are all praising the streamlined procedure of absentee voting. None are marking their posts as ads or disclosing their relationship with an ad agency or the Central Electoral Commission.
The list of these tricks goes on and on, but what's uniting them all is the heavy reliance on Western digital platforms for all kinds of propaganda: from traditional public service announcements to uncredited attack ads and online harassment of opponents. None of these platforms are doing much to protect their users from the latter – trolls are even exploiting Facebook's opaque terms of service to mass-report and ban opponents – and there's little indication that they are putting users' interests above those of the state.
Threats from Russian officials to ban this or that tech giant from Russia often make the headlines, but the reality is that the two are codependent. Russia is a lucrative digital ad market, and its government heavily relies on social media for propaganda. Facebook has recently appointed a policy representative for Russia, which means its regular meetings and talks with Russia's media watchdog Roskomnadzor are now happening on a government level, with a Foreign Ministry official present. The result is that it's unlikely that 2018 will bring either a blanket ban on Western social media in Russia – or a toning down in government-sponsored trolling and online censorship.
Alexey Kovalev is managing editor at Codastory.com
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
