Social Media Listening Platforms in Wartime Russia

The Russian online sphere today is subjected to sophisticated forms of control, including self-censorship, legal repression, and the shutdown of global platforms such as X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, leaving state-controlled Russian platforms as the primary means of digital communication for the public. In this article, we explore the potential and limitations of using social media data to study cultural processes and societal dynamics within a non-transparent authoritarian context of wartime Russia as the government attempts to censor all explicit forms of political communication. Specifically, we discuss data provided by social media listening (SML) platforms and argue that, despite methodological and organizational challenges, SML in an authoritarian context offers unique opportunities to gauge cultural and social trends, particularly through the identification of micro triggers (signals) and macro patterns of online discourse. The huge volume of data extracted from SML enables scholars to explore deeper layers of information beyond mere text, including metadata from platforms such as author details and engagement metrics, and provides AI-driven analytical tools, such as sentiment analysis, topic modeling, and named entity recognition.