Protest Eco-Activism in the Digital Environment (On the Example of the "Krasnoyarsk Case")

Abstract

The subject of this article is protest eco-activism in the digital environment on the example of the resonant “Krasnoyarsk case”. Using thematic modelling by latent Dirichlet placement (LDA), we analyzed comments on environmental topics on social media VKontakte, Odnoklassniki, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram for January 1, 2021 — June 14, 2021. We highlighted six key themes and identified two of them as the most “protest”. These two protest themes are mainly caused by negative externalities of the economic activities of enterprises and dissatisfaction with the quality of political management of state bodies.

The “Krasnoyarsk case” of online protest eco-activism was studied on the regional eco-communities VKontakte using the information and analytical system “Medialogia”. An analysis of the offline activity of protesters and data on the involvement of users of eco-communities on VKontakte in the “Krasnoyarsk case” does not allow us to assert that there is a direct relationship between high involvement and a large number of protesters. The authors concluded the situational and contextual nature of offline protests. Digital participation of opinion leaders in the case helps attract the attention of a broad Internet audience and consider the local situation as part of the national or global agenda.

The index of protest eco-activism proposed by the authors allows scoring a specific case based on the criteria of localization, intensity, politicization, the situation’s current status, and the potential for conflict. The rank of the index provides information to key stakeholders in the face of society, business, and government about the current situation and potential scenarios for the development of events for making strategic and tactical decisions.