Gender Dimension of Digital Vigilantism in Russia

Digital vigilantism can be defined as the coordinated actions of civic groups in virtual space (not excluding the possibility of going offline) in response to imaginary or real actions of third parties or as the expression of outrage at a real-world event recorded and uploaded online. Digital vigilantism serves as an informalised institution of online civil society, regulating behaviour and punishing citizens for actions or intentions that are inappropriate from the vigilantes’ point of view. In modern Russia, movements that were formed as a result of the interactions between NGOs, individual activists and the authorities, that are now acting as auxiliary institutions, become quite popular. This phenomenon suggests the spread of guided vigilantism. The authors argue that the governmental structures recognize the impossibility of solving some conflict situations within formal institutions and therefore legitimize their regulation through network interactions. This article focuses on the gender aspects of digital vigilantism in Russia. In order to analyze gender characteristics of Russian vigilante communities, the authors collected the data on the subscribers of six online communities using the VKontakte API (application programming interface): “StopHam”, “Lev Protiv”, “Khrushi Protiv”, “Sorok Sorokov”, “Anti-Dealer” and “Sober Yard”. A dataset of 818 927 records was generated, which included basic socio-demographic information about the users (ID, user-specified name, gender, age, city). Analyzing the posts and comments uploaded over the last two years and the database of subscribers of typical vigilante communities in the VKontakte social network (2900 subscriptions), the authors were able to come closer to understanding users’ motivations, define the social portrait of a “typical digital vigilante” and identify gender characteristics of the movement. Research outcomes confirm the problematic persistence of gender asymmetry and the inheritance of enduring cultural stereotypes regarding the correlation between “the female” and “the male”, even concerning such a new form of civic activism in Russia as digital vigilantism.