The Anatomy of Censorship and Propaganda: Evidence from Russian Wikipedias
Joint work with Ekaterina Zhuravskaya Ulrich Matter Ruben Durante Vladimir Avetian
Abstract: Authoritarian regimes shape citizens’ knowledge and beliefs through censorship and propaganda. We study which narratives they suppress and promote using a rare natural experiment: Ruwiki, created in 2023 by cloning Russian-language Wikipedia and selectively rewriting its 1.9 million articles under regime-aligned editorial control. We compare the two platforms twenty months after the fork, using within-Wikipedia changes as a placebo benchmark. We find that Ruwiki’s editing patterns resemble professional rather than volunteer-driven content production. An LLM-based comparison and machine-learning analyses of text deletions and insertions reveal a coherent ideology organized around three pillars: Russia’s image vis-à-vis the rest of the world, domestic politics, and culture. The resulting narratives legitimize Russia’s past and present acts of aggression, suppress accounts of domestic opposition and human-rights violations, and promote traditional values. Culture’s centrality reveals how authoritarian information control penetrates domains far beyond formal politics, including morality, gender, family life, law, and psychology. Article deletions are rare and confined to topics that are difficult to reframe, while editing is broad, consistent with a preference for reframing existing content rather than leaving unanswered queries: 27% of articles undergo at least some change, 2.8% are heavily edited, and only 0.14% are deleted. Rewriting sensitive topics reduces readability, suggesting that ideological control is costly. An external benchmark using official high-school history textbooks confirms that Ruwiki’s revisions move articles on modern history toward state-sanctioned narratives. The results show how authoritarian information control constructs a regime-aligned account of the world and Russia’s place in it.
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