Welcome to RUCARR seminar 13 October!

Nikolay Ternov: "Simulated Grassroots: How Russian Bot Networks Delegitimize Joe Biden on VKontakte"

Speaker:

Nikolay Ternov is Associate Professor of Sociology and Political Science at L.N. Gumilyov Eurasian National University (Astana, Kazakhstan). His research uses computational methods to study digital media and political communication in the post-Soviet space.

Abstract:

How does digital propaganda manufacture the appearance of popular opinion? Drawing on a corpus of 48,000 messages posted by bot accounts on VKontakte (2019-2024), this talk examines how Joe Biden is represented in the astroturfing discourse of the RuNet. Combining sentence embeddings, UMAP/HDBSCAN topic modeling, lexical analysis and sentiment and toxicity classification, I show that the campaign relies less on overt aggression than on what we call "low-threshold rhetorical toxicity": irony, infantilization ("grandfather") and cognitive stigmatization ("senile", "poor Biden"). Biden is assembled as a symbolic anti-leader, a figure of weakness and geopolitical threat, while pseudo-patriotic formulas such as "our country" disguise coordinated activity as the voice of ordinary citizens. Bot activity follows the political agenda closely, functioning as an infrastructure of narrative maintenance rather than a simple relay of messages. I conclude by discussing the limits of bot identification on closed platforms and how these findings connect to ongoing work on Telegram in Kazakhstan.

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