Digital Diplomacy or Hybrid Warfare: Russian Embassies Online

Russia’s information warfare has contributed to the rapid growth of the literature on ‘hijacking’ of soft power by authoritarian regimes, i.e. the situation in which authoritarian regimes seek to achieve their foreign policy objectives through the manipulation of the Internet, the establishment of pseudo–civil society organizations, and disinformation (Brady 2015, Walker 2016, Kragh and Åsberg 2017). This paper contributes to this literature by using big data analysis of online behavior of Russian embassies located in EU countries. There has been considerable cross country variation in the intensity with which Russian embassies rely on Twitter to reach the local population, with Greece having the most pro-active Russian embassy online. The number of tweets submitted from that account has been 10 times higher compared to the rest of EU. This paper applies sentiment analysis and topic modeling to a unique dataset of all tweets posted by Russian embassies in EU between 2011 and 2019 to develop and test a topology of strategies for information warfare. By doing so, the papers bridges the exiting gap between the literature on abuses of soft power by authoritarian regimes with the literature on the rise of digital diplomacy (Fletcher 2016, Potter 2002, Sandre 2015)