This book uniquely combines the authors’ personal experiences, deep cultural and professional experience of living and working in Russia and the former USSR, and interest and experience with language and computational analysis, to shed light on a highly contemporary question: what is motivating conflict and unrest in Russia and its surrounding countries? How does Russian government suppression of information manifest in practice today, and how does it fit into the historical cultural pattern for Russia? The authors take a computational look at social and traditional media in the original languages, from Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, and the English-speaking world, to glean insights and separate fact from fiction.This book helps readers interested in Eastern Europe to ‘take the temperature’ of the region today, but it is also of interest to readers in the policy and analysis community, because it offers a template, an analytical ‘how-to’ guide which aims to follow in the footsteps of CIA author Richards Heuer’s ‘Psychology of Intelligence Analysis’, to show how state-of-the-art computational analysis techniques could be applied to similar problems in other topic areas, with the human analyst and computational techniques each working together to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts.
Author(s): Peter Chew, Matthew Fort, Jonathan Chew
Publisher: Springer
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 469
City: Cham
Preface
Acknowledgments
Contents
1 Introduction
Reference
2 Soviet Union 2.0
2.1 Background
2.2 Soviet Union 2.0, or Patrimonialism x.0?
2.3 Parallels Between Twentieth-Century Soviet Life and Russian Realities Today
2.3.1 The Information and Economic Island Created by the Iron Curtain
2.3.2 The Heavy Hand of Soviet Indoctrination
2.3.3 Repression
2.3.4 Soviet Life—Drab and Dilapidated
2.3.5 The Ideology of Soviet Life
2.3.6 How Likely Is a Soviet Union 2.0?
2.4 Social Media Analysis
2.5 Conclusions and Recommendations for Strategic Communications
References
3 The Real Drivers of Russia’s War in Ukraine
3.1 Background
3.1.1 A Widespread Russian View of Ukraine: Rooted in Language, Culture, and Religion
3.2 Issues Surrounding Ukraine
3.2.1 Russian Troop Buildup on the Border
3.2.2 Russian Hydrocarbons and Their Place in Europe
3.2.3 NATO Enlargement
3.3 What Does Social Media Say About the Issues?
3.3.1 Discussion of Ukraine in Russian-Speaking Twitter
3.3.2 Discussion of Ukraine in Ukrainian-Speaking Twitter
3.3.3 Discussion of NATO in Both Russian- and Ukrainian-Speaking Twitter
3.4 Conclusions and Recommendations for Strategic Communications
References
4 The Polish Information Environment
4.1 Background
4.1.1 Language, Culture, and Religion as Predictors of Geopolitical Fault Lines
4.2 Current Issues Surrounding Poland
4.2.1 The EU Versus Poland on Primacy of Law
4.2.2 Polish Nationalism and World War II
4.2.3 The Polish-Belarus Border
4.2.4 The Suwałki Corridor
4.2.5 The Buildup of Russian Forces Along Ukraine’s Border
4.3 Analysis of Social Media Landscape in Poland Versus East Slavdom
4.3.1 Interpretation of the Maneuvers That Have Led to the Current Point
4.3.2 Twitter Data Collection and Analysis
4.4 Conclusions and Recommendations for Strategic Communications
Appendix 1: Polish ‘Border’ Tweets
Appendix 2: Russian ‘Border’ Tweets
References
5 The Baltic Region Information Environment
5.1 Background: Brief History of the Baltics
5.2 A Distillation of Multiple Threat Assessments and Perspectives
5.2.1 Brief Background on Threat Assessment
5.2.2 Environmental Threats
5.2.3 Espionage Threats
5.2.4 Military Threats
5.2.5 Cyber Threats
5.2.6 Destabilizing Threats
5.2.7 Russian Limitations
5.3 Analysis of Social Media Landscape
5.3.1 The BEND Framework
5.3.2 Research Hypotheses
5.3.3 Topic Selection
5.3.4 Data Retrieval
5.3.5 Data Processing
5.3.6 Exploration of Results
5.3.7 Discussion
5.4 Conclusions and Recommendations for Strategic Communications
References
6 Finding and Analyzing the ‘Fringe’ Versus the ‘Mainstream’
6.1 Fringe Narratives: An Illustrative Example Involving Russia and Its Eurasian Ambitions
6.2 The ‘Brotherhood of Nations’: A Historical Pattern, Not an Anomaly
6.3 Eurasian Integration: Coming in the Near Future?
6.4 How Can We Analyze Fringe Beliefs?
6.4.1 Why Fringe Beliefs Matter: Did They Help End the Cold War?
6.4.2 The Role of Language in Fringe Beliefs
6.4.3 Connection to Foundational Computational Linguistics Concepts
6.4.4 Problem Statements With Respect to Fringe Beliefs
6.4.5 Combining PMI and Clustering to Find Unknown Unknowns
6.5 Demonstration and Technical Implementation
6.5.1 Dataset
6.5.2 Technical Implementation
6.5.3 Key Waypoints in the Approach
6.6 Conclusions
Appendix 1: Hand-Curated ‘Fringe Belief’ Text
References
7 Computational Analysis of Russian Media Narratives on the War in Ukraine
7.1 Background
7.2 Data Used for This Chapter, and Method of Collection
7.3 Our Approach: Signal Processing (and SVD) Fundamentals
7.4 Key Narratives in 2022 in Russian Media
7.4.1 Application of SVD to Our Data
7.4.2 Topics of Interest: Detailed Discussion
7.4.3 Key Takeaways
7.5 What’s Mainstream and what’s Fringe in Russian Media?
7.5.1 How We Can Answer This Question with SVD
7.5.2 A Global View of Mainstream and Outliers in the Russian Media Landscape
7.5.3 Digging Deeper with Keyness Analysis
7.6 How Topics Changed Over Time in Russian Media
7.6.1 January 1st–15th: Kazakhstan Unrest
7.6.2 January 16th–31st: Fractious Political Relations Between Ukraine and Russia
7.6.3 February 1st–15th: Mockery of Ukrainian and British Politicians
7.6.4 February 16th–28th: Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine
7.6.5 March 1st–15th: Evacuating Civilians; Ukraine–Russia Peace Talks
7.6.6 March 16th–31st: Ukrainian Deaths; Chechen Fighters in Ukraine
7.6.7 April 1st–15th: Ukrainians Killed in Bucha; Alleged Terrorist Threats within Russia
7.6.8 April 16th–30th: Russian Media Stops Talking about Ukraine
7.6.9 May 1st–May 16th: Victory Day in Russia
7.6.10 Key Takeaways
7.7 Conclusions
Appendix 1: Full List of Topics Extracted from 2,838 Russian Media Articles, 1/1/2022–5/16/2022
Appendix 2: Jupyter Notebook Code Snippets
Appendix 3: Russian Stopwords Used for Keyness Analysis
Appendix 4: Time Relative Frequency Analyses: Full List of Charts by Half-Month
References
8 Conclusion
Index
