Political discussions in online oppositional communities in the non-democratic context

Taking into account YouTube’s specific role in the Russian media system and the increasing level of political polarization in the country, this study examines the role of incivility in discussions and whether discussions in an anti-government community represent a place for disagreement between pro-opposition and pro-government users. I argue that an online environment helps these sides meet each other rather than creating echo chambers of like-minded users. Moreover, in the quite restrictive Russian context for political deliberation, the incivility of messages plays a role in further involving commenters in discussions. Using the corpus of comments posted in the discussion section of opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s YouTube channel, I exploited class affinity modeling to identify pro-government and pro-opposition stances. Incivility was studied based on Google’s Perspective API toxicity classifier. I found that users avoid extreme forms of incivility when interacting with other commenters, but uncivil comments are more likely to start discussion threads. Furthermore, the level of incivility in comments gets higher over time after a video release. Pro-government sentiments, on the one hand, are associated with a subsequent response from Navalny’s supporters to the out-group criticism and, on the other hand, contribute to the further formation of hubs with a pro-government narrative. This research contributes to the extant literature on affective polarization on social media, shedding light on political discussions within an oppositional community in a non-democracy

Navalny’s direct-casting: Affective attunement and polarization in the online community of the most vocal Russian opposition politician

Social media has a significant impact on the process of political polarization. Despite a large body of research on polarization and social media in democracies, studying this relationship in autocracies remains a niche field. This paper describes the content, composition, and behavioral patterns of discussions that take place on YouTube in the community of Russia’s most vocal opposition politician, Alexei Navalny. Based on a corpus of more than eight million comments, this study provides empirical evidence on the relatively short-term nature of affective attunement induced by a leader promising social changes within an authoritarian context. This discovery is manifested in the observation that periods of high public interest in Navalny’s activities are marked by a significant influx of new audience members into his community. However, the retention rate of this cohort of users was lower than that of the cohort of commenters, who started discussions during periods of lower public interest in Navalny’s activities. This conclusion applies not only to the entire set of commenters, but also to pro-government and anti-government users. According to the exploratory text analysis, the most common topics in discussions were praising Navalny’s activities, criticizing the government, and enticing people to share videos to change the minds of apolitical citizens or pro-government supporters. Finally, one of the affective polarization parameters, the degree of toxicity of discussions, is higher on Navalny’s community than on an apolitical celebrity’s YouTube channel, which establishes a baseline for the level of incivility

Ideological positioning of political parties in competitive regimes: thesis abstract for a degree of candidate of political science: 23.00.02 -- political institutions, processes and technologies

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#iononmiinginocchio: Sports Politicisation in the Italian Twitter Space. Text Data Analysis of the Italian Public Opinion

Owing to their popularity, sports often turn into arenas for political contestation. The practice of taking the knee as a symbolic stance against racism was started in 2016 and is entrenched with the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. This practice generated discussions in the Italian public opinion during Euro 2020, where the ambiguous stance of the Italian soccer team contributed to the debate. This article addresses this particular case as an example of more widespread practices of antiracist contestation (and public opinion reactions thereto) in sports, approaching Italian public opinion studies from the underexplored angle of computational social science. We collected tweets featuring the hashtag #iononmiinginocchio (and its variations) throughout the duration of Euro 2020. The language used was analysed through network analysis and toxicity analysis to observe the characteristics of the debate and the rhetoric employed. This research finds that, despite politicians’ media visibility throughout the debate, the Twitter discussion was mainly driven by common citizens. In this context, a toxic language encompassing white supremacist, homophobic, and sexist remarks was often employed with a silencing effect on a wide share of the Twitter usership