When Context Matters. Analyzing Conflicts with the Use of Big Textual Corpora from Russian and International Social Media

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Fragmentation and Polarization of the Public Sphere in the 2000s: Evidence from Italy and Russia

After the Arab spring, direct linkage between growth of technological hybridization of media systems and political online-to-offline protest spill-overs seemed evident, at least in several aspects, as ‘twitter revolutions’ showed organizational potential of the mediated communication of today. But in de-facto politically transitional countries hybridization of media systems is capable of performing not just organizational but also ‘cultivational’ roles in terms of creating communicative milieus where protest consensus is formed, provoking spill-overs from expressing political opinions online to street protest.The two cases of Italy and Russia are discussed in terms of their nonfinished process of transition to democracy and the media’s role within the recent political process. In the two cases, media-political conditions have called into being major cleavages in national deliberative space that may be conceptualized like formation of nation-wide public counter-spheres based upon alternative agenda and new means of communication. The structure and features of these counter-spheres are reconstructed; to check whether regional specifics are involved into the formation of this growing social gap, quantitative analysis of regional online news media (website menus) is conducted. Several indicators for spotting the formation of counter-spheres and criteria for further estimation of democratic quality of such counter-spheres are suggested

Fragmentation and Polarization of the Public Sphere in the 2000s: Evidence from Italy and Russia

After the Arab spring, direct linkage between growth of technological hybridization of media systems and political online-to-offline protest spill-overs seemed evident, at least in several aspects, as ‘twitter revolutions’ showed organizational potential of the mediated communication of today. But in de-facto politically transitional countries hybridization of media systems is capable of performing not just organizational but also ‘cultivational’ roles in terms of creating communicative milieus where protest consensus is formed, provoking spill-overs from expressing political opinions online to street protest.The two cases of Italy and Russia are discussed in terms of their nonfinished process of transition to democracy and the media’s role within the recent political process. In the two cases, media-political conditions have called into being major cleavages in national deliberative space that may be conceptualized like formation of nation-wide public counter-spheres based upon alternative agenda and new means of communication. The structure and features of these counter-spheres are reconstructed; to check whether regional specifics are involved into the formation of this growing social gap, quantitative analysis of regional online news media (website menus) is conducted. Several indicators for spotting the formation of counter-spheres and criteria for further estimation of democratic quality of such counter-spheres are suggested

Real-World Political Polarization in Twitter Discussions on Inter-Ethnic Conflicts

Studies of political polarization in social media demonstrate mixed evidence for whether discussions necessarily evolve into left and right ideological echo chambers. Recent research shows that, for political and issue-based discussions, patterns of user clusterization may differ significantly, but that cross-cultural evidence of the polarization of users on certain issues is close to non-existent. Furthermore, most of the studies developed network proxies to detect users’ grouping, rarely taking into account the content of the Tweets themselves. Our contribution to this scholarly discussion is founded upon the detection of polarization based on attitudes towards political actors expressed by users in Germany, the USA and Russia within discussions on inter-ethnic conflicts. For this exploratory study, we develop a mixed-method approach to detecting user grouping that includes: crawling for data collection; expert coding of Tweets; user clusterization based on user attitudes; construction of word frequency vocabularies; and graph visualization. Our results show that, in all the three cases, the groups detected are far from being conventionally left or right, but rather that their views combine anti-institutionalism, nationalism, and pro- and anti-minority views in varying degrees. In addition to this, more than two threads of political debate may co-exist in the same discussion. Thus, we show that the debate that sees Twitter as either a platform of ‘echo chambering’ or ‘opinion crossroads’ may be misleading. In our opinion, the role of local political context in shaping (and explaining) user clusterization should not be under-estimated

Beyond Left and Right: Real-World Political Polarization in Twitter Discussions on Inter-Ethnic Conflicts

Studies of political polarization in social media demonstrate mixed evidence for whether discussions necessarily evolve into left and right ideological echo chambers. Recent research shows that, for political and issue-based discussions, patterns of user clusterization may differ significantly, but that cross-cultural evidence of the polarization of users on certain issues is close to non-existent. Furthermore, most of the studies developed network proxies to detect users’ grouping, rarely taking into account the content of the Tweets themselves. Our contribution to this scholarly discussion is founded upon the detection of polarization based on attitudes towards political actors expressed by users in Germany, the USA and Russia within discussions on inter-ethnic conflicts. For this exploratory study, we develop a mixed-method approach to detecting user grouping that includes: crawling for data collection; expert coding of Tweets; user clusterization based on user attitudes; construction of word frequency vocabularies; and graph visualization. Our results show that, in all the three cases, the groups detected are far from being conventionally left or right, but rather that their views combine anti-institutionalism, nationalism, and pro- and anti-minority views in varying degrees. In addition to this, more than two threads of political debate may co-exist in the same discussion. Thus, we show that the debate that sees Twitter as either a platform of 'echo chambering' or 'opinion crossroads' may be misleading. In our opinion, the role of local political context in shaping (and explaining) user clusterization should not be under-estimated

Constructive Aggression? Multiple Roles of Aggressive Content in Political Discourse on Russian YouTube

Abstract Today, aggressive verbal behavior is generally perceived as a threat to integrity and democratic quality of public discussions, including those online. However, we argue that, in more restrictive political regimes, communicative aggression may play constructive roles in both discussion dynamics and empowerment of political groups. This might be especially true for restrictive political and legal environments like Russia, where obscene speech is prohibited by law in registered media and the political environment does not give much space for voicing discontent. Taking Russian YouTube as an example, we explore the roles of two under-researched types of communicative aggression—obscene speech and politically motivated hate speech—within the publics of video commenters. For that, we use the case of the Moscow protests of 2019 against non-admission of independent and oppositional candidates to run for the Moscow city parliament. The sample of over 77,000 comments for 13 videos of more than 100,000 views has undergone pre-processing and vocabulary-based detection of aggression. To assess the impact of hate speech upon the dynamics of the discussions, we have used Granger tests and assessment of discussion histograms; we have also assessed the selected groups of posts in an exploratory manner. Our findings demonstrate that communicative aggression helps to express immediate support and solidarity. It also contextualizes the criticism towards both the authorities and regime challengers, as well as demarcates the counter-public

Public Discussion in Russian Social Media: An Introduction

Russian media have recently (re-)gained attention of the scholarly community, mostly due to the rise of cyber-attacking techniques and computational propaganda efforts. A revived conceptualization of the Russian media as a uniform system driven by a well-coordinated propagandistic state effort, though having evidence thereunder, does not allow seeing the public discussion inside Russia as a more diverse and multifaceted process. This is especially true for the Russian-language mediated discussions online, which, in the recent years, have proven to be efficient enough in raising both social issues and waves of political protest, including on-street spillovers. While, in the recent years, several attempts have been made to demonstrate the complexity of the Russian media system at large, the content and structures of the Russian-language online discussions remain seriously understudied. The thematic issue draws attention to various aspects of online public discussions in Runet; it creates a perspective in studying Russian mediated communication at the level of Internet users. The articles are selected in the way that they not only contribute to the systemic knowledge on the Russian media but also add to the respective subdomains of media research, including the studies on social problem construction, news values, political polarization, and affect in communication

Unhealthy communication on health: Discursive and ecosystemic features of opinion cumulation in the anti-vaccination discourse on Russian Telegram

With the advent of social networking sites, the so-called health dissidents have received unprecedented possibilities for online community building and spreading their views. In particular, the combination of social uncertainty and the platform affordances that bordered antivaxxer communities from outer communication led to formation of (allegedly) closed-up online milieus where vaccination denialists’ (‘antivaxxers’) irrational views resided and grew. The deliberative counter-productivity of such communities needs to be investigated. In this respect, Russia is a special case, characterized by low trust in the public sphere as a ground for the spread of conspiracy theories, and by ‘mixed’ trust to the healthcare system, thanks to highly-reputable Soviet-time medical services but negative attitudes to the current ones. We look at @anti_ covid21, the largest Russian pandemic antivaxxer community on Telegram, to explore by what means destructive opinions accumulate in this community. We investigate the combination of three discursive elements usually studied separately in research on COVID-19 denialism: 1) distrust, including its addressees, and interconnectedness of the destructive features of the antivaxxer discourse, namely distrust, aggression, and conspiracy thinking; 2) the patterns of micro-opinion cumulation that lead to general growth of distrust; 3) content sourcing that supports ‘the discourse of distrust.’ We follow the conceptual framework of cumulative deliberation; it implies that micro-acts of opinionated participation matter both en masse and in deliberative micro-patterns. Our sample includes all posts and comments from @anti_covid21 of six months of 2021, with 1,185 posts and 282,000+ comments altogether. Out of this sample, three datasets were formed. In particular, Dataset 1 was received by semi-automatedly reducing from 282,000+ to 12,188+ texts and then coded by 28 coders. Dataset 2 comprised comment threads of three most active days in terms of commenting, of 411 comments altogether, that were coded as continuous samples by 6 additional coders. Dataset 3 consisted of the 1,185 posts in which the available attracted content (text, photo, or video) was coded by 4 coders on its formal belonging to certain media types and countries of origin. Our results show that @anti_covid21 was a reactive community centered around one-sided anti-vaccination content that left no room for multi-view discussing. Content sourcing united user-generated evidence, criticized mainstream media pieces, and publications of blurred origin of many countries, making the community open to world experience but of highly biased nature. The ‘discourse of distrust’ that emerged in response was politicized, distrust to national and global actors potentially being a mediator to vaccine distrust. We identified two stable micro-patterns of accumulation of distrust triggered by both the published content and user behavior. Altogether, our conclusions differ from other countries’ experiences and call for pre-emptive resolution of the multi-faceted issue of social distrust before new health crises erupt