Political technology' is the means by which the Kremlin achieved a monopoly of political control after the chaos of the 1990s. It then metastasised to take over other areas: civil society, history and foreign policy. Political technology produced the propaganda that produced the war against Ukraine. Political technology will outlive the end of real politics in an increasingly authoritarian Russia; it influences everything else that Russia does.

Chapter 5 introduces network analysis. Social media data frequently has elements that are amenable to network analysis, including friend/follower networks and retweet networks. This chapter addresses how to collect and operationalize this data into measures appropriate for network analysis. It shows how to collect en masse the timelines of a given set of users, in addition to traversing their friend and follower networks. In addition, it demonstrates how to do so by collecting all tweets of all members of Congress in real time. Finally, it demonstrates in applied form how to identify automated accounts (bots) among the data being collected.

This chapter explores core arguments surrounding the political use of bots. It details the brief history of their use online. It accesses the academic literature to highlight key themes on the subject of what some researchers call computational propaganda and others simultaneously call “information operations,” “information warfare,” “influence operations,” “online astroturfing,” “cybertufing,” and many other terms. Computational propaganda, and each of these other concepts to one degree or another, focuses on the ways in which the use of algorithms, automation (most often in the form of political bots), and human curation are used over social media to purposefully distribute misleading information over social media networks.