Florian Toepfl
Biographic Data
| ID | 4451685 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Florian Toepfl |
| GIVEN NAMES | Florian |
| FAMILY NAME | Toepfl |
| SIGNATURE | TOEPFL F |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Passau |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5773-779X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 84 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Prigozhin’s Propaganda Team: The St Petersburg Internet Research Agency (2013–2021)
Existing research on the now defunct St Petersburg Internet Research Agency (Agentstvo internet-issledovanii-IRA), owned by now-deceased oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, has focused on content analysis.Little is known about its organisation.This study uses 350 CVs of former IRA employees to provide insights into its structure and evolution (2013)(2014)(2015)(2016)(2017)(2018)(2019)(2020)(2021).It shows that the IRA recruited mainly young, inexperience…
Disrupting or invigorating an anti-democratic counterpublic? How highly active commenters engage on RT German’s Facebook page
Anti-democratic counterpublic news media frequently open up participatory spaces, inviting their audiences to partake in the discussion of their content. However, research on how commenters engage in such participatory spaces opened up and overseen by anti-democratic actors is scarce. In order to fill this gap, we present in this article a case study of the 250 most active commenters on RT German’s Facebook page in a 6-month period at the height …
Entertainment interspersed with propaganda: How non-legacy-news accounts deliver explicitly political content to mass audiences on Russia’s most popular social network VK
Previous research on political communication on Russia's most popular social network VK has concluded that most users avoid news by not following legacy-news accounts. In this study, we expand the universe of scrutinized accounts with the most-followed non-legacy-news accounts (>100,000 followers) that regularly publish what we theorize to be ‘explicitly political content’ (EPC; N = 355). We delineate a typology of six types of EPC accounts, calc…
ANO Dialog: Innovation in controlling Russia’s digital information
ANO Dialog, a new organization closely linked to the Russian presidential administration, was founded in Moscow in 2019 with the aim of “creating digital dialogue between the state and the public.” By 2022, it was operating in most Russian regions and had more than 2,000 employees. Between 2023 and 2024, the EU, the UK, and the US imposed sanctions on ANO Dialog for spreading online propaganda and its involvement in foreign disinformation campaig…
The Consequences of Evidence- Versus Non-Evidence-Based Understandings of the “Truth: How Russian Speakers in Germany Negotiate Trust in Their Transnational News Environments
Extant research on migrants’ media use and trust has delivered mixed evidence on whether, and in which ways, migrants stay loyal to their homeland news media and/or develop trust in host-society media, particularly when the narratives of the two types of media clash. To advance this strand of research, this study scrutinizes how an audience group with migration background, who lived the first part of their lives under authoritarian rule but then …
Conduits of the Kremlin’s Informational Influence Abroad? How German-Language Alternative Media Outlets Are Connected to Russia’s Ruling Elites
Extant research on alternative media in Western democracies has focused on scrutinizing their content, organization, production, and audiences. However, the extent to which alternative outlets are linked to powerful foreign actors has not yet been analyzed, despite the fact that a plethora of outlets have openly sided with Russia after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, spreading the Kremlin’s propagandistic narratives. To fill …
Who are the plotters behind the pandemic? Comparing Covid-19 conspiracy theories in Google search results across five key target countries of Russia’s foreign communication
This article advances extant research that has audited search algorithms for misinformation in four respects. Firstly, this is the first misinformation audit not to implement a national but a cross-national research design. Secondly, it retrieves results not in response to the most popular query terms. Instead, it theorizes two semantic dimensions of search terms and illustrates how they impact the number of misinformative results returned. Furth…
Different platforms, different plots? The Kremlin-controlled search engine Yandex as a resource for Russia’s informational influence in Belarus during the Covid-19 pandemic
Extant research demonstrated that the algorithms of the Kremlin-controlled search engine Yandex, compared to those of its US-based counterpart Google, frequently produce results that are biased toward the interests of Russia’s ruling elites. Prior research, however, audited Yandex’s algorithms largely within Russia. In contrast, this study is the first to assess the role of Yandex’s web search algorithms as a resource for Russia’s informational i…
Gauging reference and source bias over time: How Russia’s partially state-controlled search engine Yandex mediated an anti-regime protest event
Massive efforts have been dedicated to studying political search engine bias in democratic contexts, and a growing body of literature has scrutinized search engine censorship in authoritarian China. By contrast, very little is known still about political search engine bias within Russia’s slightly more open authoritarian media system. In order to fill in this gap, this study asks: How has Russia’s leading partially state-controlled search engine …
The (Non-)Adoption of Participatory Newsroom Innovations under Authoritarian Rule: How Comment Sections Diffused in Belarus and Azerbaijan (1998–2017)
Extant research on how innovations diffuse among news organizations over time has largely focussed on democratic contexts. By contrast, this is the first longitudinal study to investigate the spread of a participatory newsroom innovation under authoritarian rule. Adopting a multiple case study design, the article reconstructs the histories of comment sections on the opinion-leading online media in two authoritarian contexts, which varied maximall…
Critically Commenting Publics as Authoritarian Input Institutions: How Citizens Comment Beneath their News in Azerbaijan, Russia, and Turkmenistan
Little is known presently about how, why, and with what consequences audiences comment on their news in contemporary authoritarian regimes. In order to address this gap, this study leverages recent theorizing about the multiple public sphere under non-democratic rule. Accordingly, critically commenting publics are theorized as “input institutions” that not only create risks but also offer important benefits for autocrats. Grounded in this approac…
Spirals of Speaking Out? Effects of the “Suppressed Voice Rhetoric” on Audiences’ Willingness to Express Their Opinion
A defining feature of counterpublics is to claim that their views are deliberately excluded from the mainstream public sphere. This rhetorical strategy – which we theorize as “suppressed voice rhetoric” (SVR) – has become omnipresent in today’s polarized media environments. In this article, we present an experimental study (N = 464) that investigated the effect of SVR in right-wing counterpublic user comments on the audience. We found that, when …
Comparing Authoritarian Publics: The Benefits and Risks of Three Types of Publics for Autocrats
Researchers comparing political communication across non-democratic contexts presently lack a widely acknowledged theoretical framework to guide their efforts. In order to fill in this gap, this essay develops a theoretical account that proposes comparing not authoritarian media systems, but “authoritarian publics.” Drawing on theories of the multiple public sphere, two typologies are delineated: (a) a three-fold typology of partial publics, oper…
Querying the Internet as a mnemonic practice: How search engines mediate four types of past events in Russia
In the digital memories literature, the practice of searching for information – one of the most frequent online activities worldwide – has received comparatively little attention. To fill the gap, this exploratory study asks how search engines affect the representations of the past that they produce in query results. Designed as a single revelatory case study, with a focus on Russia, this article delineates a typology of four types of memory even…
From connective to collective action: Internet elections as a digital tool to centralize and formalize protest in Russia
Over the past decade, an extensive body of literature has emerged on the question of how new communication technologies can facilitate new modes of organizing protest. However, the extant research has tended to focus on how digitally enabled protest operates. By contrast, this study investigates why, how, and with what consequences a heavily digitally enabled ‘connective action network’ has transitioned over time to a more traditional ‘collective…
Transferring control from the backend to the frontend: A comparison of the discourse architectures of comment sections on news websites across the post-Soviet world
This study compares how comment sections (CSs) were implemented, as of summer 2016, on the 179 leading national news websites across the 15 post-Soviet countries. In order to pursue this aim, a novel coding scheme is developed that facilitates assessment of the degree to which the discourse architectures of CSs transfer control over the content published from the backend to the frontend of a website. Accordingly, each CS is assigned a value on a …
Targeting dominant publics: How counterpublic commenters align their efforts with mainstream news
This study illustrates how the emphasis structure of counterpublic discourses surfacing online can be predicted by that of the dominant publics that these counterpublics—at the argumentative level—so resolutely oppose. Deploying a single common case study design, the article scrutinizes a counterpublic discourse that surfaced in the comment sections of Germany’s opinion-leading news websites in the week after the surprising electoral success of a…
Innovating consultative authoritarianism: Internet votes as a novel digital tool to stabilize non-democratic rule in Russia
Extant research on the consequences of the Internet for non-democratic politics has focused on how oppositional activists leverage new digital tools. By contrast, still, relatively little is known about how authoritarian elites proactively deploy digital technologies to legitimize their rule. This article contributes to filling this gap by scrutinizing one highly innovative tactic that has recently been adopted repeatedly by Russia’s ruling elite…
Public Spheres in Interaction: Comment Sections of News Websites as Counterpublic Spaces
Research scrutinizing political talk online has been developed largely against the backdrop of deliberative discursive norms and considered political talk without a systematic analysis of surrounding mass-mediated discourses. By contrast, this study operationalizes counterpublic theory as an alternative theoretical perspective and analyzes comments on news websites as a reaction to hegemonic mainstream public spheres. It juxtaposes a qualitative …
Four facets of critical news literacy in a non-democratic regime: How young Russians navigate their news
Fuelled by the Arab Spring, the question of how the rise of internet-mediated communication affects authoritarian regimes has received unprecedented attention within the discipline of communications. However, in this debate, scholars have not yet turned to the concept of literacy and addressed the role of citizens’ knowledge about political media in any greater depth. This is surprising since the concept of literacy as ‘emancipatory knowledge’, i…
Making Sense of the News in a Hybrid Regime: How Young Russians Decode State TV and an Oppositional Blog
The past 2 decades have seen an increasingly intense debate on how the rise of Internet-mediated communication has impacted politics in (semi)authoritarian regimes. Previous works have adopted a wide array of approaches. Yet, to date no major study has investigated how citizens in these regimes are making sense of political messages they encounter online in the new, more fragmented media environments of the Internet age. In an initial attempt to …
Why do pluralistic media systems emerge? Comparing media change in the Czech Republic and in Russia after the collapse of communism
A quarter of a century after the collapse of communism in the former Eastern bloc, a wide range of scholarly projects have been undertaken to compare and theorize processes of media change in the region. One question that scholars have sought to address is: what were the factors that crucially impacted how these media landscapes evolved? This essay aims to contribute to this debate by juxtaposing media change in two selected cases: the Czech Repu…
Blogging for the Sake of the President: The Online Diaries of Russian Governors
This work was supported by research fellowships of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation (Cologne, Germany), the Harriman Institute (Columbia University, New York, USA), and the Aleksanteri Institute (University of Helsinki, Finland). Many Western researchers have hailed blogs of politicians as new, interactive and ‘inherently democratic’ tools of political communication. Yet, as this essay illustrates, blogs can be of comparatively even greater appeal to…
Managing public outrage: Power, scandal, and new media in contemporary Russia
Over the past three decades, scholars studying the phenomenon of political scandal have mostly based their works on the premise that scandals can only occur in liberal democracies. Contradictory to this assumption, however, some of the most heavily discussed phenomena in contemporary semi-authoritarian Russia are scandals emanating from the new, vibrant sphere of social media thriving on a largely unfiltered internet. How are these ‘internet scan…
Managing public outrage: Power, scandal, and new media in contemporary Russia
Over the past three decades, scholars studying the phenomenon of political scandal have mostly based their works on the premise that scandals can only occur in liberal democracies. Contradictory to this assumption, however, some of the most heavily discussed phenomena in contemporary semi-authoritarian Russia are scandals emanating from the new, vibrant sphere of social media thriving on a largely unfiltered internet. How are these ‘internet scan…
Innovating consultative authoritarianism: Internet votes as a novel digital tool to stabilize non-democratic rule in Russia
Extant research on the consequences of the Internet for non-democratic politics has focused on how oppositional activists leverage new digital tools. By contrast, still, relatively little is known about how authoritarian elites proactively deploy digital technologies to legitimize their rule. This article contributes to filling this gap by scrutinizing one highly innovative tactic that has recently been adopted repeatedly by Russia’s ruling elite…
Targeting dominant publics: How counterpublic commenters align their efforts with mainstream news
This study illustrates how the emphasis structure of counterpublic discourses surfacing online can be predicted by that of the dominant publics that these counterpublics—at the argumentative level—so resolutely oppose. Deploying a single common case study design, the article scrutinizes a counterpublic discourse that surfaced in the comment sections of Germany’s opinion-leading news websites in the week after the surprising electoral success of a…
Comparing Authoritarian Publics: The Benefits and Risks of Three Types of Publics for Autocrats
Researchers comparing political communication across non-democratic contexts presently lack a widely acknowledged theoretical framework to guide their efforts. In order to fill in this gap, this essay develops a theoretical account that proposes comparing not authoritarian media systems, but “authoritarian publics.” Drawing on theories of the multiple public sphere, two typologies are delineated: (a) a three-fold typology of partial publics, oper…
Blogging for the Sake of the President: The Online Diaries of Russian Governors
This work was supported by research fellowships of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation (Cologne, Germany), the Harriman Institute (Columbia University, New York, USA), and the Aleksanteri Institute (University of Helsinki, Finland). Many Western researchers have hailed blogs of politicians as new, interactive and ‘inherently democratic’ tools of political communication. Yet, as this essay illustrates, blogs can be of comparatively even greater appeal to…
Conduits of the Kremlin’s Informational Influence Abroad? How German-Language Alternative Media Outlets Are Connected to Russia’s Ruling Elites
Extant research on alternative media in Western democracies has focused on scrutinizing their content, organization, production, and audiences. However, the extent to which alternative outlets are linked to powerful foreign actors has not yet been analyzed, despite the fact that a plethora of outlets have openly sided with Russia after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, spreading the Kremlin’s propagandistic narratives. To fill …
Different platforms, different plots? The Kremlin-controlled search engine Yandex as a resource for Russia’s informational influence in Belarus during the Covid-19 pandemic
Extant research demonstrated that the algorithms of the Kremlin-controlled search engine Yandex, compared to those of its US-based counterpart Google, frequently produce results that are biased toward the interests of Russia’s ruling elites. Prior research, however, audited Yandex’s algorithms largely within Russia. In contrast, this study is the first to assess the role of Yandex’s web search algorithms as a resource for Russia’s informational i…
Querying the Internet as a mnemonic practice: How search engines mediate four types of past events in Russia
In the digital memories literature, the practice of searching for information – one of the most frequent online activities worldwide – has received comparatively little attention. To fill the gap, this exploratory study asks how search engines affect the representations of the past that they produce in query results. Designed as a single revelatory case study, with a focus on Russia, this article delineates a typology of four types of memory even…
Transferring control from the backend to the frontend: A comparison of the discourse architectures of comment sections on news websites across the post-Soviet world
This study compares how comment sections (CSs) were implemented, as of summer 2016, on the 179 leading national news websites across the 15 post-Soviet countries. In order to pursue this aim, a novel coding scheme is developed that facilitates assessment of the degree to which the discourse architectures of CSs transfer control over the content published from the backend to the frontend of a website. Accordingly, each CS is assigned a value on a …
The Consequences of Evidence- Versus Non-Evidence-Based Understandings of the “Truth: How Russian Speakers in Germany Negotiate Trust in Their Transnational News Environments
Extant research on migrants’ media use and trust has delivered mixed evidence on whether, and in which ways, migrants stay loyal to their homeland news media and/or develop trust in host-society media, particularly when the narratives of the two types of media clash. To advance this strand of research, this study scrutinizes how an audience group with migration background, who lived the first part of their lives under authoritarian rule but then …
Four facets of critical news literacy in a non-democratic regime: How young Russians navigate their news
Fuelled by the Arab Spring, the question of how the rise of internet-mediated communication affects authoritarian regimes has received unprecedented attention within the discipline of communications. However, in this debate, scholars have not yet turned to the concept of literacy and addressed the role of citizens’ knowledge about political media in any greater depth. This is surprising since the concept of literacy as ‘emancipatory knowledge’, i…
Managing public outrage: Power, scandal, and new media in contemporary Russia
Over the past three decades, scholars studying the phenomenon of political scandal have mostly based their works on the premise that scandals can only occur in liberal democracies. Contradictory to this assumption, however, some of the most heavily discussed phenomena in contemporary semi-authoritarian Russia are scandals emanating from the new, vibrant sphere of social media thriving on a largely unfiltered internet. How are these ‘internet scan…
Blogging for the Sake of the President: The Online Diaries of Russian Governors
This work was supported by research fellowships of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation (Cologne, Germany), the Harriman Institute (Columbia University, New York, USA), and the Aleksanteri Institute (University of Helsinki, Finland). Many Western researchers have hailed blogs of politicians as new, interactive and ‘inherently democratic’ tools of political communication. Yet, as this essay illustrates, blogs can be of comparatively even greater appeal to…
Making Sense of the News in a Hybrid Regime: How Young Russians Decode State TV and an Oppositional Blog
The past 2 decades have seen an increasingly intense debate on how the rise of Internet-mediated communication has impacted politics in (semi)authoritarian regimes. Previous works have adopted a wide array of approaches. Yet, to date no major study has investigated how citizens in these regimes are making sense of political messages they encounter online in the new, more fragmented media environments of the Internet age. In an initial attempt to …
Why do pluralistic media systems emerge? Comparing media change in the Czech Republic and in Russia after the collapse of communism
A quarter of a century after the collapse of communism in the former Eastern bloc, a wide range of scholarly projects have been undertaken to compare and theorize processes of media change in the region. One question that scholars have sought to address is: what were the factors that crucially impacted how these media landscapes evolved? This essay aims to contribute to this debate by juxtaposing media change in two selected cases: the Czech Repu…
Four facets of critical news literacy in a non-democratic regime: How young Russians navigate their news
Fuelled by the Arab Spring, the question of how the rise of internet-mediated communication affects authoritarian regimes has received unprecedented attention within the discipline of communications. However, in this debate, scholars have not yet turned to the concept of literacy and addressed the role of citizens’ knowledge about political media in any greater depth. This is surprising since the concept of literacy as ‘emancipatory knowledge’, i…
Public Spheres in Interaction: Comment Sections of News Websites as Counterpublic Spaces
Research scrutinizing political talk online has been developed largely against the backdrop of deliberative discursive norms and considered political talk without a systematic analysis of surrounding mass-mediated discourses. By contrast, this study operationalizes counterpublic theory as an alternative theoretical perspective and analyzes comments on news websites as a reaction to hegemonic mainstream public spheres. It juxtaposes a qualitative …
Innovating consultative authoritarianism: Internet votes as a novel digital tool to stabilize non-democratic rule in Russia
Extant research on the consequences of the Internet for non-democratic politics has focused on how oppositional activists leverage new digital tools. By contrast, still, relatively little is known about how authoritarian elites proactively deploy digital technologies to legitimize their rule. This article contributes to filling this gap by scrutinizing one highly innovative tactic that has recently been adopted repeatedly by Russia’s ruling elite…
Transferring control from the backend to the frontend: A comparison of the discourse architectures of comment sections on news websites across the post-Soviet world
This study compares how comment sections (CSs) were implemented, as of summer 2016, on the 179 leading national news websites across the 15 post-Soviet countries. In order to pursue this aim, a novel coding scheme is developed that facilitates assessment of the degree to which the discourse architectures of CSs transfer control over the content published from the backend to the frontend of a website. Accordingly, each CS is assigned a value on a …
Targeting dominant publics: How counterpublic commenters align their efforts with mainstream news
This study illustrates how the emphasis structure of counterpublic discourses surfacing online can be predicted by that of the dominant publics that these counterpublics—at the argumentative level—so resolutely oppose. Deploying a single common case study design, the article scrutinizes a counterpublic discourse that surfaced in the comment sections of Germany’s opinion-leading news websites in the week after the surprising electoral success of a…
From connective to collective action: Internet elections as a digital tool to centralize and formalize protest in Russia
Over the past decade, an extensive body of literature has emerged on the question of how new communication technologies can facilitate new modes of organizing protest. However, the extant research has tended to focus on how digitally enabled protest operates. By contrast, this study investigates why, how, and with what consequences a heavily digitally enabled ‘connective action network’ has transitioned over time to a more traditional ‘collective…
Querying the Internet as a mnemonic practice: How search engines mediate four types of past events in Russia
In the digital memories literature, the practice of searching for information – one of the most frequent online activities worldwide – has received comparatively little attention. To fill the gap, this exploratory study asks how search engines affect the representations of the past that they produce in query results. Designed as a single revelatory case study, with a focus on Russia, this article delineates a typology of four types of memory even…
Spirals of Speaking Out? Effects of the “Suppressed Voice Rhetoric” on Audiences’ Willingness to Express Their Opinion
A defining feature of counterpublics is to claim that their views are deliberately excluded from the mainstream public sphere. This rhetorical strategy – which we theorize as “suppressed voice rhetoric” (SVR) – has become omnipresent in today’s polarized media environments. In this article, we present an experimental study (N = 464) that investigated the effect of SVR in right-wing counterpublic user comments on the audience. We found that, when …
Comparing Authoritarian Publics: The Benefits and Risks of Three Types of Publics for Autocrats
Researchers comparing political communication across non-democratic contexts presently lack a widely acknowledged theoretical framework to guide their efforts. In order to fill in this gap, this essay develops a theoretical account that proposes comparing not authoritarian media systems, but “authoritarian publics.” Drawing on theories of the multiple public sphere, two typologies are delineated: (a) a three-fold typology of partial publics, oper…
The (Non-)Adoption of Participatory Newsroom Innovations under Authoritarian Rule: How Comment Sections Diffused in Belarus and Azerbaijan (1998–2017)
Extant research on how innovations diffuse among news organizations over time has largely focussed on democratic contexts. By contrast, this is the first longitudinal study to investigate the spread of a participatory newsroom innovation under authoritarian rule. Adopting a multiple case study design, the article reconstructs the histories of comment sections on the opinion-leading online media in two authoritarian contexts, which varied maximall…
Critically Commenting Publics as Authoritarian Input Institutions: How Citizens Comment Beneath their News in Azerbaijan, Russia, and Turkmenistan
Little is known presently about how, why, and with what consequences audiences comment on their news in contemporary authoritarian regimes. In order to address this gap, this study leverages recent theorizing about the multiple public sphere under non-democratic rule. Accordingly, critically commenting publics are theorized as “input institutions” that not only create risks but also offer important benefits for autocrats. Grounded in this approac…
Gauging reference and source bias over time: How Russia’s partially state-controlled search engine Yandex mediated an anti-regime protest event
Massive efforts have been dedicated to studying political search engine bias in democratic contexts, and a growing body of literature has scrutinized search engine censorship in authoritarian China. By contrast, very little is known still about political search engine bias within Russia’s slightly more open authoritarian media system. In order to fill in this gap, this study asks: How has Russia’s leading partially state-controlled search engine …
Who are the plotters behind the pandemic? Comparing Covid-19 conspiracy theories in Google search results across five key target countries of Russia’s foreign communication
This article advances extant research that has audited search algorithms for misinformation in four respects. Firstly, this is the first misinformation audit not to implement a national but a cross-national research design. Secondly, it retrieves results not in response to the most popular query terms. Instead, it theorizes two semantic dimensions of search terms and illustrates how they impact the number of misinformative results returned. Furth…
Different platforms, different plots? The Kremlin-controlled search engine Yandex as a resource for Russia’s informational influence in Belarus during the Covid-19 pandemic
Extant research demonstrated that the algorithms of the Kremlin-controlled search engine Yandex, compared to those of its US-based counterpart Google, frequently produce results that are biased toward the interests of Russia’s ruling elites. Prior research, however, audited Yandex’s algorithms largely within Russia. In contrast, this study is the first to assess the role of Yandex’s web search algorithms as a resource for Russia’s informational i…
The Consequences of Evidence- Versus Non-Evidence-Based Understandings of the “Truth: How Russian Speakers in Germany Negotiate Trust in Their Transnational News Environments
Extant research on migrants’ media use and trust has delivered mixed evidence on whether, and in which ways, migrants stay loyal to their homeland news media and/or develop trust in host-society media, particularly when the narratives of the two types of media clash. To advance this strand of research, this study scrutinizes how an audience group with migration background, who lived the first part of their lives under authoritarian rule but then …
Conduits of the Kremlin’s Informational Influence Abroad? How German-Language Alternative Media Outlets Are Connected to Russia’s Ruling Elites
Extant research on alternative media in Western democracies has focused on scrutinizing their content, organization, production, and audiences. However, the extent to which alternative outlets are linked to powerful foreign actors has not yet been analyzed, despite the fact that a plethora of outlets have openly sided with Russia after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, spreading the Kremlin’s propagandistic narratives. To fill …
Entertainment interspersed with propaganda: How non-legacy-news accounts deliver explicitly political content to mass audiences on Russia’s most popular social network VK
Previous research on political communication on Russia's most popular social network VK has concluded that most users avoid news by not following legacy-news accounts. In this study, we expand the universe of scrutinized accounts with the most-followed non-legacy-news accounts (>100,000 followers) that regularly publish what we theorize to be ‘explicitly political content’ (EPC; N = 355). We delineate a typology of six types of EPC accounts, calc…
ANO Dialog: Innovation in controlling Russia’s digital information
ANO Dialog, a new organization closely linked to the Russian presidential administration, was founded in Moscow in 2019 with the aim of “creating digital dialogue between the state and the public.” By 2022, it was operating in most Russian regions and had more than 2,000 employees. Between 2023 and 2024, the EU, the UK, and the US imposed sanctions on ANO Dialog for spreading online propaganda and its involvement in foreign disinformation campaig…
Prigozhin’s Propaganda Team: The St Petersburg Internet Research Agency (2013–2021)
Existing research on the now defunct St Petersburg Internet Research Agency (Agentstvo internet-issledovanii-IRA), owned by now-deceased oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, has focused on content analysis.Little is known about its organisation.This study uses 350 CVs of former IRA employees to provide insights into its structure and evolution (2013)(2014)(2015)(2016)(2017)(2018)(2019)(2020)(2021).It shows that the IRA recruited mainly young, inexperience…
Disrupting or invigorating an anti-democratic counterpublic? How highly active commenters engage on RT German’s Facebook page
Anti-democratic counterpublic news media frequently open up participatory spaces, inviting their audiences to partake in the discussion of their content. However, research on how commenters engage in such participatory spaces opened up and overseen by anti-democratic actors is scarce. In order to fill this gap, we present in this article a case study of the 250 most active commenters on RT German’s Facebook page in a 6-month period at the height …
Political science (21 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Social Media and Politics (17 works) · Law (15 works) · Politics (15 works) · Media studies (14 works) · Media Studies and Communication (14 works) · Democracy (11 works) · Authoritarianism (10 works) · Law (10 works)