The Ghosts Navalny Met: Russian YouTube-Sphere in Check
The disrupted Russian media ecosystem facilitates the flourishing of political blogging on social media; the political communication expands beyond the over-controlled, institutionalised channels of political interaction. This paper maps the activity on YouTube, incorporating media and communication...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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MDPI AG
2021-11-01
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| Series: | Journalism and Media |
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| Online Access: | https://www.mdpi.com/2673-5172/2/4/40 |
| Summary: | The disrupted Russian media ecosystem facilitates the flourishing of political blogging on social media; the political communication expands beyond the over-controlled, institutionalised channels of political interaction. This paper maps the activity on YouTube, incorporating media and communication studies to the analysis of a hybrid political regime to answer the following research question: <i>What representations of Navalny are available in the Russian YouTube-sphere?</i> The analysis of a statistically random sample of 366 videos associated with the keyword “Navalny” works in two phases: image type analysis and narrative analysis. Both phases help to identify the traditional institutionalised political actors in the spillovers of political communication trends in the YouTube-sphere. This work not only enriches and updates the current understanding of the Russian political communication ecosystem, but also helps expand the research on contemporary quasi-democratic political scenarios and the communicative strategies of their legitimisation. |
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| ISSN: | 2673-5172 |