Can Authoritarian Propaganda Compete with the Opposition on Social Media? Experimental Evidence from Russia

Abstract

This paper probes the persuasive power of authoritarian propaganda on social media and compares it to a similar campaign by the opposition. We carried out a field experiment during the 2018 presidential elections in Russia by collecting voting intentions and then randomly advertising a pro- and anti-regime YouTube video during a telephone survey shortly before the elections. During a follow-up interview after the elections, we gathered data on actual voting decisions to measure the effect of our treatments. We find that state propaganda on social media was only effective in persuading respondents who consumed exclusively offline news sources, but failed to engage respondents consuming online news and even decreased their propensity to vote for the incumbent, conditional on their dissatisfaction with the government's performance. The anti-regime video, on the other hand, consistently decreased voting for the incumbent among both groups of respondents. Our results refute a widespread belief about the potency of authoritarian propaganda by showing its inability to engage individuals outside of its traditional audience.