Information Wars and Online Activism During the 2013/2014 Crisis in Ukraine: Examining the Social Structures of Pro‐ and Anti‐Maidan Groups

Abstract

This article examines how online groups are formed and sustained during crisis periods, especially when political polarization in society is at its highest level. We focus on the use of Vkontakte (VK), a popular social networking site in Ukraine, to understand how it was used by Pro-and AntiMaidan groups during the 2013/2014 crisis in Ukraine. In particular, we ask whether and to what extent the ideology (or other factors) of a particular group shapes its network structure. We find some support that online social networks are likely to represent local and potentially preexisting social networks, likely due to the dominance of reciprocal (and often close) relationships on VK and opportunities for group members to meet face-to-face during offline protests. We also identify a number of group-level indicators, such as degree centralization, modularity index and average engagement level, that could help to classify groups based on their network properties. Community researchers can start applying these group-level indicators to online communities outside VK; they can also learn from this article how to identify networks of spam and marketing accounts.

Leaders or Brokers? Potential Influencers in Online Parliamentary Networks

“…The idea behind ERG models is to “generate a large set of random networks based on a chosen set of network properties and node attributes from the observed network. To determine the quality of the resulting model, randomly generated networks are then compared to the observed network” (Gruzd & Tsyganova, ). This procedure allowed us to test whether the presence of communication ties in the network was based more on the network properties and the nodes’ attributes than by chance alone.…”

Un potencial comunicativo desaprovechado. Twitter como mecanismo generador de diálogo en campaña electoral

“…Esto provoca que resuenen más las ideas afines y que otras opiniones alternativas queden relegadas a espacios minoritarios Verweij, 2012;Jackson y Lilleker, 2011). En esa línea, diversos autores enfatizan la idea de que las redes sociales favorecen la polarización política (Gruzd y Roy, 2014;Gruzd y Tsyganova, 2015).…”

Analyzing Social Media And Learning Through Content And Social Network Analysis: A Faceted Methodological Approach

“…Macro-level measures found to be useful when analyzing and comparing different social networks include density, reciprocity, centralization, and modularity (Gruzd & Tsyganova, 2015). Table 4 summarizes the values of these measures for both the Name and Chain networks.…”