The Internet is harnessed as an ideal means for
organization and promotion of protest ideology, which does not
require special institutional facilities for maintenance and
development. Radical right-wing extremism is reckoned to be among
the public sentiments employing this global network. Consequently,
Russia is experiencing the tightening of Internet controls. The
objective of our study is identification of the audience of Russian
radical right-wing extremist online groups registered in the largest
Russian social network Vkontakte and analysis of their properties
under conditions of the state-sanctioned censorship of extremist
content. The methodological frame of the study is the conception of
modernization, which describes both the process of transformation of
traditionalism into modernity and the forces of counteraction to this
process. The methods of linguistic markers and social network
analysis are employed as the main tools for the furtherance of our
objective.
Radical Right-Wing Extremism in Russian Cyberspace: Proliferation under Conditions of Ban
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