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Abstract

Computational propaganda—the use of political bots and trolls for orchestrated interventions in online political discourse—is not the only means through which nefarious actors assert political influence in democracies around the world. In the context of influence operations, a significant—yet, understudied—phenomenon is the so-called “boots on the ground”—political communities with ties to state actors that aptly use digital tools to engage in framing and contestation of political events, narratives, and agendas. This article defines political micro-influencers as strategic communicative actors who perform authentic political identities with the goal of influencing public attitudes and behaviors. Situating the inquiry in the context of Russian influence operations, this article investigates the case of the Night Wolves Motorcycle Club by mapping the narratives associated with the movement and examining their structural and functional characteristics. Findings demonstrate how migrant counterpublics and historically nonconforming social groups get co-opted to propagate Russian geopolitical influence in Western democracies. On the basis of this case, the study provides guidelines and suggestions for future work on identifying political micro-influencers and tracing their narratives across the digital ecosystem.

Keywords

political influencers social media narratives geopolitics Russia

Introduction

Human geopolitics is a process through which states exercise control over their migrant populations abroad, transforming migrant and diasporic communities into constituency-building projects (Gamlen, 2019). Social technology platforms often mediate these state-sponsored influence operations, which predicated the rise of political micro-influencers who propagate these agendas to broader international audiences under the guise of grassroots organizing and cultural activism. This article contributes to understanding political micro-influencers by focusing on Russian migrant publics and their online presence. Of particular interest in light of their size and visibility is the Night Wolves Motorcycle Club (rus. Ночные волки)—one of Russia’s oldest and largest motorcycle organizations with 65 chapters all across Russia, as well as the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), European Union, North America, and other parts of the world (Harris, 2020).

While the origins and aesthetics of this biker gang are similar to those of their Western counterparts, their ties with the Russian military and intelligence turn them into dynamic, geographically dispersed megaphones of the Russian political influence in their countries of operation. This also makes the biker gang’s online presence a living record of Russia’s influence operations, and thus a site of empirical inquiry for this study. The Night Wolves’ online presence is constituted by a number of official accounts and public and private channels and groups on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, VK, and Telegram. Some of the most prominent accounts belong to the motorcycle club’s leader Alexander Zaldastanov (nickname: Surgeon) who has over 18K followers on Facebook, over 48K on Instagram, and up to 2.5K subscribers on his Telegram channel. The official Night Wolves Motorcycle Club community on Facebook has a little over 6K members in the main group, with numerous smaller local chapters represented on the platform. The official Telegram channel has 3K subscribers with an additional 200 subscribers on YouTube. Despite these otherwise unremarkable engagement metrics, the motorcycle club chapters frequently make local headlines in their countries of operation, which affords them the kind of public recognition and notoriety that often flies under the radar of international media. Collecting digital trace data on the club chapters and their activities can yield insights into understanding the structural and functional features of digitally mediated political narratives presented by these micro-influencers online.

Computational propaganda—the use of political bots and trolls to orchestrate interventions in online political discourse (Boichak et al., 2021)—is not the only means of nefarious actors asserting their political influence in Western democracies. In the context of influence operations, a significant—yet, understudied—phenomenon is the so-called “boots on the ground”—political communities and issue groups with ties to state actors that aptly use digital tools to engage in framing and contestation of political events and agendas (Kleiner et al., 2023; Schradie, 2019). These political communities are often mobilized by the so-called political micro-influencers—for the purpose of this article, we will define them as strategic communicative actors who perform authentic political identities with the goal of influencing political attitudes and behaviors on behalf of states and state-like entities. The Night Wolves’ seemingly “grassroots” nature and geographically dispersed organizational pattern allows the club to operate under the threshold of large-scale propaganda campaigns, while it also affords them visibility and credibility in their countries of operation through the use of social media. The club specializes in organizing small-scale public events, from bike rides to Christmas shows, to promote the ideals of the “Russian world,” commemorate the Russian version of historic events, and present public displays of support for the current course of the Russian government. Over the past decade, the club has grown from having regional units in all major Russian cities, to being represented in most Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), and finally to grow to over 65 chapters across 10 countries. It reports having over 5,000 members globally.

To understand the nature of the political influence exerted by the Night Wolves Motorcycle Club online, this study situates this inquiry in the broader context of Russia’s geopolitics. I ask two research questions:

RQ1: What narratives do the Night Wolves engage to exert political influence on social media? What are the structural and functional features of those narratives?

RQ2: What does the case of the Night Wolves reveal about the Russian political influence ecosystem, and about the concept of a political influencer more broadly?

Mapping the digitally mediated narratives surrounding this community and identifying their structural and functional features yields insights about the Russian political influence ecosystem and helps ground the concept of a political micro-influencer in empirical observations. The case of the Night Wolves illustrates how migrant counterpublics may be strategically deployed to institutionalize illegal contestation of state borders, and how the digital trace data generated by political micro-influencers on social media can be used for the communicative construction of narratives about geopolitical doctrines. Ultimately, the findings tell a cautionary tale of human geopolitics unfolding in and through platform-mediated spaces, which bear a series of implications on our understanding of the role played by political micro-influencers in larger state-sponsored influence ecosystems.

Platforms and the Mechanism of Political Micro-Influence

Changes in the media landscape, including an increased significance of social media as a news source, affect people’s social and political values, attitudes, and, to a lesser extent, behaviors. Contrary to mechanistic/deterministic/algorithm-centric models of agenda setting, in online ecosystems the process of public opinion formation manifests in the form of crystallization—social influence precipitates, and oftentimes solidifies, individual attitudes and beliefs that constitute each user’s perception of their social reality (Wohn & Bowe, 2016). In hybrid media ecosystems defined through coexistence and interaction between older and newer media logics, genres, and organizational forms (Chadwick, 2013), influencers have been the solution to exert influence over hard-to-reach populations and stakeholders (Enke & Borchers, 2019). Corporations and agencies have been known to successfully engage micro agenda setting within the influencer economy: influencers play a key role in crystallizing attitudes and behaviors regarding brands, purchasing behaviors, and lifestyle choices. As it happens, the micro-agenda-setting mechanism may also be deployed to influence political attitudes (M. Riedl et al., 2021), which turns influencers into an object of inquiry in this study.

Social media influencers (SMIs) are strategic communicative actors who (1) narrate their lifestyles through textual and/or visual means, (2) engage and interact with their audience across digital and physical spaces, usually with the purpose of (3) monetizing their visibility and followership resulting from (1) and (2) (Abidin, 2015; Enke & Borchers, 2019). For this reason, SMIs are often defined through the size of their follower networks, which predicate their visibility in online spaces and assert a certain quality of relationships with other users on the platform (Enke & Borchers, 2019). The size of the follower network thus serves as a proxy for the influencers’ authority, as well as their capacity to reach populations of interest. Importantly, the two key influence metrics—authority and followership—are not always correlated: nano-influencers are able to exercise high authority among their limited number of followers (under 1,000) due to perceptions of authenticity (Alassani & Göretz, 2019). Micro-influencers, whose followership ranges between 1,000 and 10,000, usually require constant online engagement and interaction with their audience to reach the levels of trust afforded by their less “influential” counterparts; the followers’ commitment further drops in the case of macro-influencers whose followers range between 10,000 and 100,000, and subsequently the mega influencers with followership over 100,000 (Alassani & Göretz, 2019).

Explanations for the diminishing marginal trust and authority at scale have to do with the change in the SMI’s perceptions of (1) intimacy—feeling personal familiarity or proximity to the user, (2) authenticity—perceiving the user’s lifestyle and values as “real” and genuine, (3) believability—perceiving the influencer’s posts and/or lifestyle as credible, and therefore true, and (4) emulatability—the ease with which the influencer’s values, behaviors, and/or lifestyle can be mimicked or adopted as one’s own (Abidin, 2015; M. Riedl et al., 2021). These four criteria translate well into the political communication settings, in which SMIs strive to increase their political authority through their relationships with their network of followers. More importantly, these criteria also situate countercultural groups such as biker gangs as perfect candidates for the role of political micro-influencers, as long as these groups are perceived as authentic, believable, “down to earth,” known by people “on the ground” and admired for their lifestyle.

While there is a fast-growing body of literature on the agenda-setting power of news in various cultural contexts, SMIs, who are known to create content about mundane, day-to-day activities, especially those traditionally considered to represent counterculture, have rarely been at the center of inquiry in this set of literatures (Wohn & Bowe, 2016). This necessitates conceptual work surrounding the political dimension of SMI activities. To define the concept of a political influencer, one would need to look beyond the content of the posts, exploring the influence ecosystem more broadly and the functions relegated to SMIs within. In strategic communication contexts, SMIs are often defined in relation to the stakeholders on whose behalf the influence occurs and the specific strategic objectives of these influence operations (Enke & Borchers, 2019). Whereas traditional influence campaigns may focus on shaping the knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors of the audience, the goals of political influence operations can extend to non-kinetic military operations (information warfare, electronic warfare, cyberattacks) and cultivating relationships with non-state actors, including networks of organized crime, with the goal of exerting political influence in other states (Galeotti, 2016; Zabyelina, 2019).

Promoting a public persona—a “celebrity”—is often a strategic goal of SMI engagement, which in the context of political influencers can generate political capital through the creation of a personal brand (Enke & Borchers, 2019; Marwick, 2015). Branding is particularly relevant for geographically distributed communities such as motorcycle clubs, in which multiple actors may contribute to the crystallization of distinct political attitudes associated with the brand. In contexts like these, the value exchange that is one of the necessary attributes of an SMI can take place outside of the platform—in which case, political influencers will not be explicitly producing content and/or engaging with their audiences in the same ways as traditional SMIs would. If so, traditional SMI metrics, such as the number of likes or the sheer size of their follower networks, would no longer serve as reliable estimates of their visibility and/or efficiency; what counts here is their ability to achieve their strategic objectives—specifically, crystallize certain political attitudes among populations of interest. With this in mind, the following section examines the Night Wolves and their significance in the context of Russia’s digital influencing strategies.

Night Wolves and Russia’s Strategic Geopolitical Objectives

Russian world (Русский мир, Pax Russica) is a strategic doctrine that captures and explains Russia’s geopolitical objectives with regard to its domestic population, neighbor states, as well as globally. In its narrow connotation, the Russian World refers to all persons of Russian ethnicity or descent who maintain cultural, linguistic, and faith-based links to their historical homeland regardless of where they live (Gronsky, 2017). This concept has gained traction following Vladimir Putin’s ascent to presidency in 1999 and was initially used to govern Russia’s relationships with its “compatriots abroad” (Gamlen, 2019)—however, later it got expanded to include all those with cultural or spiritual affinity for Russia and what it stands for. Drawing on this doctrine, one of the key defining features of Putin’s presidency was the “rebranding” of Russian national identity that was rooted in performative masculinity as a symbol of political power, promotion of (pseudo)historical narratives through public education and commemorative events, and an increased state support for the Russian Orthodox church (Molnho et al., 2021; Zabyelina, 2019). Experts agree that the Russian World constitutes “A Russian version of the European Radical Right” (Laruelle, 2006); over the past two decades, it has turned it into a suitable tool for legitimizing Russian’s foreign interference, which situates itself in opposition to liberal democratic values, human rights frameworks, and the Western cultural and economic hegemony more broadly.

Aside from its immense ontological significance, the Russian World also serves as an “operational matrix” that underpins Kremlin’s reliance on proxy groups to further its geopolitical interests overseas (Harris, 2021; Lutsevych, 2016, p. 8). Networks of organized crime are known to underpin various operations of Russian state power, providing services to the state in exchange for protection and resources (Galeotti, 2016; Harris, 2020). Along with the state’s security and intelligence apparatus, these groups are integrated into the state power hierarchies and are involved in a variety of extralegal activities both domestically and abroad (Taylor, 2018; Zabyelina, 2019). Smuggling of illicit weapons, funds, or people, intimidation or assasination of political opponents, and orchestrating pro-Russian insurgencies constitute the most popular activities within those groups (Boichak, 2022b; Harris, 2020).

The link between outlaw motorcycle clubs and networks of organized crime has been well established in the field of criminology (Barker, 2014). A fundamental question that drives both historical and contemporary inquiry in this space is the extent to which motorcycle clubs are bottom–up organizations that unite members around their love for motorcycles and riding, or whether some are essentially top–down criminal gangs organized to serve a different purpose altogether. This “grassroots” nature appears to be the main factor that distinguishes conventional motorcycle clubs from the “outlaw” clubs, which self-identify as “one-percenters,” juxtaposing themselves to motorcyclists for whom riding is more of a hobby than a lifestyle. Founded in 1989, the Night Wolves Motorcycle Club was indeed inspired by the “one-percenter” ideology and situated themselves in opposition to the Soviet regime (Zabyelina, 2019). After the Soviet Union’s collapse, the Night Wolves doubled up as informal security service, providing protection to small businesses that sprung in the 1990s. Eventually, this grew into a “Wolf Holding” enterprise that incorporated a number of private security companies operating in Russia and overseas (Zabyelina, 2019).

The Night Wolves have become nationally known in 2008, after they organized a motorcycle joyride in support of Presidential Candidate Vladimir Medvedev’s election victory (Harris, 2020). Putin’s presidency brought forth a remarkable shift in the club’s official views across three key areas: (1) declaring unwavering support for Vladimir Putin (Harris, 2021; Zabyelina, 2019), (2) propagating a radical ethnonationalist version of the Russian national identity (Molnár et al., 2021), and (3) promoting imperial Orthodox stances establishing strategic relationships with the Russian Orthodox Church (Adamsky, 2019). These views, which mirror and represent the key tenets of the Russian World doctrine, have enabled the club’s gradual transformation into a paramilitary organization, allowing the biker gang to significantly expand its geographic areas of influence, and subsequently their role in the Russian influence ecosystem more broadly. The Night Wolves owe a fair share of their popularity to media appearances—in the early years of Russia’s independence, their leader Alexander Zaldastanov was allegedly more likely to appear in newspapers or on television than at the club’s meetings (Harris, 2020). This justifies this empirical case selection of the Night Wolves as proto-micro-influencers who were able to successfully engage the media ecosystem for the purpose of participant recruitment (especially among regional youth), and subsequent political influence. National security experts agree the Night Wolves present an escalating security threat to Western democracies due to their integration within Russia’s military and criminal authorities, as well as well-documented ties to Russia’s foreign and domestic intelligence and security services (Harris, 2020).

Let us consider these two facts side-by-side: since 2009, the Night Wolves have been running summer camps in Crimea to allure local children and youth into “a patriotic atmosphere that combines Russian history, spirituality, and current political events”; following Russia’s annexation of Crimea, they were granted a 99% discount to purchase a 266 ha property and build the Patriot motorcycle center there (Harris, 2020, p. 263). Since 2012, the motorcycle club have also organized a number of rides to uplift the fading popularity of the Russian Patriarch Kirill and promote “the Orthodox values of the Russian civilisation” (Harris, 2020, p. 264). The Night Wolves’ annual “victory ride” connects Moscow with Berlin and runs through Belarus, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Austria, where the Night Wolves’ homage to Soviet war memorials has often attracted local media attention (Walker, 2015). In October 2021, the Night Wolves premiered a movie dedicated to Vladimir Putin’s Birthday—this movie frames the occupied Donetsk territories as a moving, dynamic frontier of the “Russian World,” setting the stage for Russia’s actions in February 2022.

The numbers and visibility of Russian-speaking diasporas on major social media platforms has seen an increase over the past few years (Smoliarova & Bodrunova, 2021)—a trend that is likely to continue in light of Russia’s recent crackdown on the freedom of speech, combined with bans of major social media platforms in the country and efforts to nationalize the internet (Satariano & Hopkins, 2022). This dynamic introduces structural changes to the concept of runet—the Russian national web, which encompasses content written in the Russian language, by users who identify as Russian, or on Russia-related topics more generally (Boichak, 2019a). Recent bans on the Russian media introduced in many Western countries in response to Russia’s military invasion and war crimes in Ukraine, along with the fragmentation of the public sphere in Russia domestically, have brought the Russian migrant publics to the fore of human geopolitics, amplifying their roles as conduits of “soft-” and “sharp power” to undermine the integrity of democratic institutions (Kleiner et al., 2023). This is not to say that all Russian diasporas engage in human geopolitics—the online public sphere also provides opportunities to express dissenting opinions (for a description of this process in Turkey, see Baser & Fasery, 2022). Furthermore, political influencers who engage in foreign interference or disinformation on behalf of the Russian state might be motivated by various incentives, some of which might be non-monetary—such as patriotism, various administrative privileges, or a fear of retribution (Harris, 2021). This makes empirical work in this area crucial for validating the key assumptions surrounding political influencers, especially among the historically nonconforming social groups that have been traditionally conceived as counterpublics and subcultures, such as biker gangs.

Mapping Semantic Structure of Digitally Mediated Narratives

This article investigates the role Night Wolves play in the Russian political influence campaigns by mapping the movement’s narratives and their sources across the digital ecosystem. To answer the research questions about the digitally mediated narratives surrounding the Night Wolves and identifying their structural and functional features, I analyze a sample of historical data (2013–2021) queried by using the #nightwolves/#ночныеволки search terms on the Facebook platform (3,586 posts). The posts were collected using Meta’s CrowdTangle tool (CrowdTangle Team, 2020), aggregated, anonymized, and compiled into a single text corpus to prevent their re-identification. The use of hashtags for data collection was a methodological choice that allowed to collect the online public discourse surrounding the Night Wolves, rather than limiting the text corpus to the posts by the motorcycle club and its members. The article employs semantic mapping (Boichak, 2019b) to identify central concepts that drive the public digitally mediated narratives featuring the biker gang (RQ1), as well as follows their digital traces (Diminescu, 2012; Hepp et al., 2018) to identify the main actors that constitute the political influence ecosystem in which the Night Wolves are situated (RQ2). Undertaking this approach has allowed to document a range of diverse perspectives on the Night Wolves and their activities, not limited to self-representation by the club and its members.

Semantic maps are a computational technique that allows to build a network from terms that co-occur in a body of text—in this instance, a post made by a user on Facebook. In semantic networks, nodes represent the nouns found in the text corpus, and links (edges) indicate the frequency of their co-occurrence (van Eck & Waltman, 2011). This networked approach to text mining allows to detect clusters of terms that co-occur in conversations among digitally mediated actors (Kang et al., 2017; Lee et al., 2009). Unlike traditional methods of topic modeling that separates terms into “buckets,” semantic mapping allows to see co-occurring terms in context—thus helping preserve the meaning embedded in the narratives (Hoffman et al., 2018). Visualizing semantic structure of digitally mediated communication may thus provide insights for understanding the issues that drive political micro-influence on social media, as well as help identity the structural and functional features of digitally mediated narratives.

With pragmatism and caution, semantic mapping may be applied to studying political influencers, albeit not without challenges unique to this object of inquiry. The first decision is the level of aggregation of the text corpus, which can reveal, as well as conceal, the insights about its structure. To make this decision, I have automatically determined the language of the posts (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Language of the posts about the Night Wolves.

A vast majority (72%) of the posts were authored in the Russian language, which suggests that the posts on the Night Wolves were authored by Russian speakers and aimed primarily at the Russian-speaking audiences. Less than 12% of all posts that mention the Night Wolves had been authored in the English language, with the remaining 16% split between Czech (10%), Slovak (2%), Bulgarian, Ukrainian, German (1% each), Bosnian, Serbian, and French (less than 1% each)—coincidentally, the countries of the Night Wolves’ operations (Harris, 2020).

Language choice is deliberate and serves as a boundary-maker in platform-mediated diasporic communities—while English is often used as a “lingua franca” to afford the diffusion of content and information to reach new (including Western) audiences (Boichak, 2022a; Boichak & Kumar, 2022), the use of Russian performs a version of an “in-group” identity among the Russian domestic and diasporic populations. Language is a significant facet of human geopolitics, through which national governments aim to strategically mobilize “compatriots” overseas (Gamlen, 2019) rather than engage in broader forms of communication with the general public globally. In this context, political micro-influencers serve as what Hutchinson (2017) refers to as cultural intermediaries, engaging in acts of cultural production to influence a very particular audience—in this instance, the Russian-speaking “compatriots” that are part of diasporic publics. Furthermore, these languages are consistent with the evidence regarding the Night Wolves’ connections with the Russian-orchestrated insurgencies in Ukraine and the far-right groups in Serbia and Bosnia (Harris, 2021).

In instances like this, one can suspect to find structural differences among the narratives aimed at different audiences. For this reason, the posts have been aggregated by language, producing a separate text corpus for posts in the Russian language and in English. To make the two network maps comparable, I translated the conversations in Russian into English using Google translation services, and then used VosViewer software (van Eck & Waltman, 2011) to generate semantic networks representing the two corpuses. To visualize the text corpus, I imported it into VosViewer in the English language, using the option of binary counting, which allows for each term to only be counted once regardless of the number of times it appears in each post; next, I set the minimum threshold of occurrences of each term at 15 for the Russian corpus and at 3 for the English (to produce two comparable networks for analysis), and set the relevance criteria at 100%, so as not to exclude important general terms that might point to the issues of interest. Simply put, the semantic networks show words that have been co-present in n number of posts within the platform-mediated conversations in the sample.

In this article, semantic mapping is not employed for the purpose of topic modeling, as such uncritical application would be ill-suited given the properties of the dataset. As the data collection has been set up using the #nightwolves hashtag, the posts are inadvertently going to involve conversations surrounding the Night Wolves motorcycle club and their activities. Having a single attribute that defines a text corpus suggests that this text corpus belongs to a single topic, with a possibility to differentiate sub-topics in clusters of terms that are more densely connected among each other (when optimizing the network for modularity). Rather than looking for sub-topics on the basis of modularity, semantic networks consisting of nouns can be productively used for mapping narratives—stories that connect key characters and events to make sense of a shared social reality (Boichak & McKernan, 2022). Approaching semantic networks with this goal in mind can help researchers identify recurring combinations of characters and events that have central significance in the given text corpus.

Once we examine the semantic representations of the Russian-language and English-language posts (Figures 2 and 3), we will find little structural difference among the two sets of aggregated posts (Appendix A). Both networks show comparatively low modularity, which suggests only partial differentiation of the text corpus: expectantly, many of the terms used in these posts overlap across clusters. Eigenvector centrality, which measures the relative influence of a node in a network (Kang et al., 2017), also reveals a similar pattern across the Russian- and English-language corpus: we can see narratives revolve around central actors such as Russia and the Night Wolves themselves, with mention of various events and locations in which the Night Wolves were involved. Focusing on the clusters, we can see three recurring themes across both sets of maps: narratives about Russia’s historical memory of war (red, cluster #1), narratives about Russia’s contemporary geopolitical conquests, including Donbas and Crimea (green, cluster #2), and lifestyle narratives depicting events in the motorcycle club’s life (blue, cluster #4). There is also a smaller cluster representing bike show events (yellow, cluster #3), as well as a distinct cluster on the English language posts announcing the club’s 75th anniversary Victory tour (purple, cluster #5).

Figure 2.

Semantic map of narratives about the Night Wolves in the Russian language.

Figure 3.

Semantic map of narratives about the Night Wolves in the English language.

Narrating the Past and Future of the Russian World

Conversations about historical memory, particularly those surrounding WWII, occupy a significant place on both maps and are represented in red. This significance is not indicative of the sheer volume of conversation about WWII, but rather suggests a higher variety of terms associated with the discussion of this particular event. The prominence of memory-related discussions is not accidental: the Russian narrative of wartime suffering and subsequent victory serves as one of the central tenets underpinning the Russian national identity (Kleiner et al., 2023; Molnár et al., 2021). This narrative is meaningful for the purpose of this study and warrants a further investigation in the context of political influencers. As Molnár et al. (2021) explain, memorialization of WWII across Europe is a fraught and fragmented process that is a site of ongoing tensions among European nations. The official version of Russian history differs from the cosmopolitan version of these historical events accepted in the West: instead of narrating WWII from the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939, in the Russian rendition the Great Patriotic War begins with Hitler’s attack on Russia in 1941, therefore downplaying Stalin’s role and responsibility in the leadup to the war.

These discrepancies in dates and events afford a construction of an alternative version of historical events that glorify Russia’s role in defeating fascism with some crucial omissions, such as the fact that Stalin began the war as Hitler’s ally (Snyder, 2022). They also reconstitute the definition of fascism primarily as a threat to Russian nationhood, values, or way of life—which later served as a justification for Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Analyzing the nature of the memorialization narratives surrounding the Night Wolves, we can see the words “place,” “region,” “village,” “roads,” “way,” as well as geographic toponyms such as Berlin and St. Petersburg and temporal markers such as “day,” “year,” making it predominantly a place-based historical narrative that highlights its geopolitical nature. Indeed, wars are significant geopolitical events—but their memorialization practices may also involve cross-border movement, drawing attention to the “infrastructural aspects of mobility including vehicles, roads and routes as mobile sites of power and contestation that have been largely overlooked in the study of border controversies and transnational memory politics” (Molnár et al., 2021, p. 75).

Here are a few examples of posts announcing the Night Wolves’ participation in this Victory Ride (translated from the Russian language):

The Night Wolves #nightwolves support the “Blue handkerchief of peace” [rally]. Tomorrow will be the start of the international motorcycle tour “Victory roads to Berlin” dedicated to the anniversary of our Great Victory! Our convoy will pass through the CIS states and countries of Europe with Victory flags and blue handkerchiefs. [All of this is] part of the “Blue handkerchief of peace” initiative, the symbols of a peaceful blue sky carried by motorcyclists on their way from Moscow to Berlin. This ride is aimed at historical memorialising and patriotic education of the young generation. We will be visiting museums and memorial complexes on our way. The final part of the ride will take place in Berlin on the 9th of May. . . Come join us there! Everyone is welcome

In this context, the Night Wolves’ commemorative anniversary Victory Road tour that involves visiting the places of the Russian military glory and the tombs of the fallen soldiers serves as a tool of contestation of historical memory in the West. This ride has caused a lot of controversy after the Night Wolves had been denied entry to Poland despite valid visas (Molnár et al., 2021).

Molnár et al. (2021) further posit that “the circulation of symbols across time and space can be enlisted to challenge existing territorial borders and symbolic boundaries” (p. 76), and we can see this discursive challenge represented on the semantic maps in green. The Night Wolves have been some of the key players in the Russian illegal annexation of Crimea, as well as the subsequent Russian-orchestrated insurgencies in the Donbas region (Harris, 2020). This diffused, decentralized nature of paramilitary intervention—using proxy forces to smuggle aid and weapons into a territory of interest—has also created opportunities for plausible deniability on the part of Putin. The term “territory,” as well as toponyms “Crimea,” “Sevastopol,” “Donbas,” “Mt Gasfort” that are discursively connected to the Night Wolves’ leader Aleksandr Zaldastanov (also referred by his nickname “Surgeon”):

. . .This motorcycle ride is dedicated to the memory of all those who gave their lives for the sacred Crimean land. For many years, since the tsarist times, this land has been watered with Russian blood, and now historical justice has happened—Crimea has been returned to Russia. . . The motorcycle ride will end with a large bike show in Sevastopol—“Ark of salvation,” in which a thousand motorcyclists will take part”).

We can also see a similar narrative of colonial appropriation quoted in the literature as belonging to Vitaliy Kishkinov, the Night Wolves Luhansk chapter leader:

resurrect the motherland—to connect the pieces that were killed off. We’re one land, one people. We were artificially divided. We have Night Wolves divisions in territories of former Soviet Union. Our mission is to bring the patriotism, orthodoxy, love for motherland and reunite. (Harris, 2020, p. 265)

During the annexation itself, the Night Wolves acted like special police force units, while the gang’s leader Zaldastanov was in charge of weapons delivery to Crimea. In the next phase of the “non-occupation” of Donetsk and Luhansk, he was a key player in transferring funds to the local recruited forces—for which he was awarded a medal “for the liberation of the Crimea and Sevastopol” (Harris, 2020, p. 265).

Following the historical memory narratives (red cluster) that transcend into the contemporary contestation of geopolitical boundaries (green cluster), the third group of narratives represents authentic performances of motorcycle culture identity (blue cluster), characterized by words such as “motorcycle,” “motorbike,” “bike show,” “event,” “program,” although as in the previous themes, there is a place-based geopolitical element in these posts:

This year, representatives of the Night Wolves All-Russian motorcycle club . . . took part in the international event. Motorcyclists visited the Log Valley, located near the city of Passau. Since 1964, torches are being lit here in honour of the deceased motorcyclists. This year, the . . . Night Wolves joined in lighting the torches. Neither snow, nor the cold February weather could prevent the feelings of brotherhood and camaraderie, participants returned home with new positive emotions and new friends.

This blue cluster also contains references to charity events and performances sponsored by the Night Wolves—since the 2000s, it was customary for organized crime representatives to sponsor public events and operate charities to promote their personal “brand” and develop relationships with the local and federal governments (Harris, 2020).

Answering RQ1, the semantic maps show prominence of conversations about the gang’s leader Alexander Zaldastanov (nickname: Surgeon) and identifies conversations about locally sponsored bike rallies held in Ukraine’s occupied territories of Crimea and Donetsk, commemorating the fifth anniversary of the annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea by Russia. The second theme foregrounds the visibility of narratives about Russia’s past, from the Russian World imaginaries through to the commemoration (and at times, reenactment) of WWII events that have solidified their formation. Finally, the third theme refers to Russia’s allies (e.g., Serbia, Bulgaria) to invoke a sense of global solidarity and mentions the Russian Spring as key tenets of the “Russian World” doctrine, demonstrating the global scale of colonial aspirations for its future, especially with regard to the European Union (EU) member states considered by Russia as its “near abroad.” These three narrative themes seek to legitimize the status of the territories occupied by Russia, glorifying the occupation by discursively linking it with the role Russian “liberators” played in WWII, as well as building affective visions of the Russian world as a core tenet of the Russian culture that seeks to reunite all Russian speakers to strengthen Russia’s positions globally. The maps presented in this study are static snapshots of activity across a few years; observing those as dynamic processes could yield more insights into attempts at orchestrated intervention in online spaces.

Situating the Night Wolves in the Russian Political Influence Ecosystem

Visualizing cross-platform traces in the form of networks is key in identifying the issues and their sources that propagate Russian political influence on the digital ecosystem. In this instance, hyperlinks bridge sociocultural spaces through connecting various types of content within and across platforms (Diminescu, 2012; Hepp et al., 2018)—we can distinctly see hyperlinking behaviors in the green cluster in Figure 2. Following the formulation of research question(s) and selection of a sample, I ran Harvester¹ algorithm to extract URLs from the text corpus and collect information about their top-level domains those URLs linked to (n = 730 URLs, which is 20% of all posts in the sample). Then, I developed a coding typology to ensure (1) the categories are robust, exhaustive, and a good “fit” for the data, (2) can be consistently applied across the text corpus to answer the research questions, and (3) rooted in the existing literature.

Content analysis presents a challenge due to a dynamic, multimodal nature of digital texts, which may become a moving target for this formal method of analysis (McMillan, 2000). In this research context, a hyperlink can be considered a coding unit, and the web page represents its context (Boichak, 2022a). The categories were developed abductively—a mode of logical inference which recognizes a grounded, inductive approach to data while at the same time draws on existing studies in this area (Kitchin, 2014). In their work, Marchal et al. (2018) have developed a comprehensive schema for labeling political content. The following coding typology includes nine types of sources and largely draws on this work while also identifying sources of particular interest in the context of the Russian political influence ecosystem (Figure 4):

Night Wolves + biker culture—everything having to do with the motorcycle club and/or biker culture more broadly, including rock music and bike shows;

Russian state-owned media and news agencies—including TASS, print media such as Kommersant and Komsomolskaya Pravda, online venues such as Lenta and Vesti, television such as 1tv, 360tv, mir24, tvzvezda, as well as foreign-facing venues such as RT.com and Sputnik, among others.

Russian online media, including official websites representing Russian regions (such as Ufa, Tatarstan, etc.)

National media in other countries—including Serbia, Ukraine, Germany, etc.

Social media—including links to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, VK, YouTube, Twitch, Flickr, etc.

Media from the Russian-occupied territories—from Donetsk, Crimea, Chechnya, etc.

Websites dedicated to the Russian Orthodox faith;

Websites dedicated to history, specifically WWII;

Other online resources not represented elsewhere.

Content analysis of the hyperlinks shared in the posts featuring Night Wolves allowed to identify the prominent actors in the Night Wolves digital ecosystem (Figure 4), as well as map the recurring sources driving the propaganda narratives (Sanovich, 2018), such as the Russian state-owned media, as well as rare and specialized online spaces dedicated to the status of the Russian occupied territories, the production of alternative versions of historical memory, and the tenets of the Russian Orthodox faith in facilitating the Russian influence abroad. Mapping the sources of communicative acts allows to observe, identify, and compare patterns within and across social media platforms, adding to understanding of how political influence is shaped and represented online. In the digital age, it has become an implicit expectation that propaganda operates covertly and under the guise of false identities (M. J. Riedl et al., 2022). Yet as the Night Wolves example suggests, this is not always the case: their members proudly identify themselves, their logo, and make no secret of their goal to influence public opinion. If anything, the only thing this group kept private were their connections—but, simple content analysis helped establish those. For this reason, exploring the digital influence ecosystem surrounding the Night Wolves was essentially an epistemological exercise: as we see from this case, the Russian digital influence ecosystem involves a concerted effort by the mainstream media and news agencies, research institutes, multimedia services, as well as social and religious groups that operate both nationally and internationally (Sanovich, 2018).

Figure 4.

The Night Wolves digital influence ecosystem (n = 730 URLs).

The finding that almost half of all posts regarding the Night Wolves link to other social media content (43%) is significant for this study—it demonstrates that Hutchinson’s (2017) argument regarding the role of social media influencers as cultural intermediaries for creative industries translates well into the (geo)political settings, whereby political micro-influencers create “natively digital” content and share it across platforms. At the same time, we see that in hybrid media ecologies, relationships between internet users and nation-states continue to be shaped (albeit to an extent) by traditional media, whether it is Russian state-owned newspapers or television, online media, or media from the Russian-occupied territories. Finally—although the fraction of these URLs is extremely small (2% each)—we see the Russian political influence ecosystem includes websites dedicated to Russian history in the WWII, as well as websites dedicated to Russian orthodoxy—both of which are the pillars of the “Russian World” doctrine. These resources help realize the club’s self-proclaimed goal to “unite the Russian Slavic society through a selfless motorcycling fraternity” (Zabyelina, 2019, p. 56).

Traditional SMI metrics, such as the number of likes or the sheer size of follower networks, do not always serve as reliable estimates of the influencers’ visibility and/or efficiency (see Kleiner et al., 2023 for an empirical estimation based on Google Trends). In this study, we consider the temporal patterns surrounding the Night Wolves and their online representation (when these posts occur—Appendix B). As follows from the semantic network analysis, posts dedicated to historical memorialization occupy a prominent space in the Night Wolves’ narratives—unsurprisingly, we see a consistent spike in online activities surrounding the motorcycle club in early May of each year represented in the dataset (in Russia, Victory Day is officially celebrated on 9 May). These posts appear to be authored by the motorcycle club chapters, as well as mainstream media organizations covering the Night Wolves’ Victory Day activities (Appendix B). Such increased visibility around those culturally significant days reflects these actors’ strategic objectives—to crystallize patriotic attitudes among the Russian-speaking populations, reaffirming the imaginaries of the Russian World through narratives related to WWII. However, these objectives do not always resonate with the audiences who might be following political influencers for a variety of reasons—as well as exhibit a range of reactions to their actions. When looking at the key user engagement metrics, we can see that the posts and events that spike the most comments and interactions among the audience have been those shared by the Russian state-owned media organizations on their socials. This suggests that the relationship in the political influence ecosystem goes both ways: political micro-influencers rely on content produced by the media in constructing their narratives, while at the same time they themselves create and participate in newsworthy events that are fed back into this ecosystem (Lukito et al., 2020).

Discussion and Conclusion: Micro-Influencers as (Geo)political Intermediaries

This exploratory case study is among the first to offer systematic insights into the Russian political influence ecosystem, visualizing the narratives featuring the Night Wolves motorcycle club, as well as identifying the main actors that constitute and propagate those narratives on social media. Importantly, while the case of the Night Wolves shines light on prominent Russian political narratives and actors, mapping the Russian political influence ecosystem in its totality would require a more systemic, comparative approach (see, for example, Bradshaw & Howard, 2017). As the number (and the sources) of well-documented empirical cases of micro-political influence grows (e.g., Kleiner et al., 2023), it might become possible to generate insights into this phenomenon at scale.

So, what lessons can we learn from collecting digital trace data on political micro-influencers? First, we can see how communicative acts are used to assert Russian political influence on the Facebook/Meta platform, with the micro-influencers connecting their global audiences to content variously produced by Russian state-owned media. Yet, in this case the mechanism of political micro-influence lies not in broadcasting their message to Western audiences directly; it works through targeting and mobilizing hard-to-reach migrant and diasporic populations in Russia’s countries of strategic interest. As the findings demonstrate, the Night Wolves are able to aptly leverage their personal familiarity and proximity with the publics within and outside Russia; authentic performances of their biker lifestyle and values; posts that appear believable and therefore true; as well as the ease with which their values, behaviors, and/or lifestyle can be mimicked or adopted as one’s own. These are the qualities that make proxy groups such as biker gangs perfect candidates for the role of political micro-influencers, as long as these communities are perceived as authentic, believable, known by people “on the ground,” and admired for their lifestyle and good deeds. These groups usually have a nuanced understanding of the local context and are perceived as independent from the states on behalf of which they act—which means their political narratives are also perceived as authentic and credible (Harris, 2021). Political micro-influencers are public opinion leaders who use social media to foster trust, credibility, authenticity, and appear “closer to the people.” This is particularly relevant in the case of authoritarian governments, whereby the perceived distance between “ordinary people” and political elites is particularly significant.

As we see from the empirical case of the Night Wolves, the activity of (geo)political micro-influencers is place-based and inadvertently rooted in political locales: Russia is a central node with a high frequency on the semantic maps, but so are other geographic toponyms. In this case, strategic communication involves invocation of national meta-narratives and contestation of borders, whether geographic borders on the map or borders of national identity. Remembering that political influencers are defined in relation to the stakeholders—political entities on whose behalf the influence occurs, this study’s findings demonstrate that these political entities have a high degree of centrality in semantic maps representing digitally mediated communication. This is a significant empirical finding that might help distinguish the agenda-setting content produced by political influencers with the purpose of influencing public attitudes and opinions or otherwise mobilizing users surrounding identity-based narratives rooted in locales and territories. If so, lexicon-based algorithms such as named entity recognition (e.g., Ul Haq et al., 2020) have potential utility to identity these instances of strategic communication.

So, who would make a perfect political micro-influencer in the context of human geopolitics? Someone whose identity is perceived as authentic and believable, and who has built lasting, reliable connections in their local communities on the basis of a cultural identity that is relatable and can be emulated. The case of the Night Wolves presents a somewhat extreme example of human geopolitics that is both well developed, well documented, and targets a very specific audience of predominantly Russian speakers overseas. Future research in this area should look into more subtle cultural identities and publics with strong ties to the Russian state: Russian Cossack groups (which is an originally Ukrainian identity appropriated by Russia), arts and culture communities (e.g., choirs), and charity organizations sponsored by the Russian Orthodox Church, pan-Slavic student communities, as well as sports and tourism organizations with explicit ties to the Russian state.

These are the contexts in which we can see the battles for territory, such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, also happening online, whereby the legitimacy of those actions gets disputed by state-sponsored actors that aim to contest the understanding of this war, thus contributing to the creation of a socially mediated geopolitical landscape. Assuming technological interconnectedness will only deepen in the next years, understanding the dynamics through which migrant counterpublics and historically nonconforming social groups getting co-opted to propagate Russian political influence in Western democracies will have increasing analytical utility. Importantly, Russia is not the only state that is actively engaging its diasporic communities in other states for the purpose of exerting political influence (Gamlen, 2019), so it is likely that the phenomenon of political micro-influencers has broader communicative and geopolitical significance and merits an inquiry in other social and cultural contexts.

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-sms-10.1177_20563051231177920 – Supplemental material for Mapping the Russian Political Influence Ecosystem: The Night Wolves Biker Gang

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-sms-10.1177_20563051231177920 for Mapping the Russian Political Influence Ecosystem: The Night Wolves Biker Gang by Olga Boichak in Social Media + Society

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This article was funded by the University of Sydney SOAR Prize.

ORCID iD

Olga Boichak

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Notes

Author Biography

Olga Boichak is a lecturer in digital cultures and the director of the Computational Social Science Lab at the University of Sydney. She is a media sociologist interested in networks, narratives, and cultures of activism in the digital age. Together with her colleagues, she has developed computational tools that support collection and analysis of online communication and interactions at scale. Boichak is editor of the Digital War journal and a frequent commentator on Russia’s war against Ukraine in the media. Her scholarship lays the groundwork for new directions in information warfare research with a focus on influence operations, civilian participation, and transnational humanitarianism surrounding wars.

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