State propaganda and popular culture in the Russian-speaking internet

2019

This chapter looks at how the Russian state authorities have attempted to influence communication on the Russian-speaking internet (‘Runet’) in the 2010s and how pro-government ‘patriotic’ views are disseminated across diverse channels of the internet. It examines the strategies employed by the Russian authorities to present propagandistic messages in discourses tailored for digital media users. More specifically, it analyses connections between the language and the imagery of political populism and the forms of popular culture and discusses how pro-state messages are positioned as attractive consumer products. peerReviewed

POLITICS, ACTIVISM AND TROLLING ON THE RUSSIAN INTERNET

2020

In the years that have passed since the social media powered protest movement of 2011-2012, the Russian government has dramatically expanded its restrictions on the Internet, while simultaneously consolidating its grip on traditional media. The Internet, which long provided a space for alternative media and free speech to blossom, is becoming increasingly restricted by a growing corpus of legislation and expanding state surveillance. With legally ill-defined prohibitions on, e.g., offending the feelings of religious believers, propagating 'non-traditional family values' and disseminating 'extremism' in place, online freedom of speech in Russia is at threat. Meanwhile, the Russian state cont…

Social media users in search of ‘facts’: the Trade Union House fire case

2021

What factors influence users to believe the stories they find in social media, and what role do emotions play for users in concluding that a particular fact is ‘true’? This article examines one aspect of emotionalized communication in social networks in an information war context, namely, how social network users make decisions about the reliability of the information they receive. We employ a qualitative study of a single case – a discussion among Russian-speaking Livejournal.com and Facebook.com users of a tragic incident in Ukraine – the deadly fire that took place in the Odessa Trade Union House on 2 May, 2014. The relevancy of this case consists in how, for all its uniqueness as a trag…

The instrumentalization of the Soviet past : the production of a digital memory

2019

Trolling as a Digital Literary Practice in the Russian Language Internet

2020

This article explores trolling as a form of literary activity. It presents a number of specific types of trolling on the Russian-language Internet in connection with digital literature and the literary practices of various groups of Internet users. Techniques for writing provocative “troll-texts” were created and developed within subcultural groups in the 1990s. Later, from being a subversive practice known only to a few insiders, it became a mass technique described in meta-texts that identified rules for trolling and shared facts about its culture with all interested users. In the 2010s, the now popularised techniques of trolling came to be seen as effective strategies to deploy in online…