Twitter's Role in Political Agendas: Russia vs Germany Analysis

1. Saint PetersburgState University Role of Twitter in formation of political agendain various socio-political contexts:the cases of discussions on migrants in Russia and Germany Svetlana Bodrunova, PhD, Anna Litvinenko, PhD School ofJournalismandMass Communications St. Petersburg State University

2. Saint PetersburgState University Theoretical premises • 1. Hybridization of media systems (Chadwick 2011, 2013): • - Tech-based growth of the web segment of media systems brings in new societal and political cleavages • - Difference in hybridization patterns depends most upon national socio-political conditions (Adam&Pfetsch 2011) • 2. Media-constructed public sphere: • - Media as ‘junctions’ of the public sphere => mediatization? • 3. Network(ed) communication theory: • Formation of closed-up communicative milieus (‘echo chambers’) • The idea of ‘spill-overs’ (online to offline, traditional/new media)

3. Saint PetersburgState University Twitter as a communicative milieu: optimism vs. pessimism • Twitter as the milieu of platform-limited horizontal communication with a big news alerts potential (Mancini&Mazzoni 2013, Vaccariet al. 2013) • Twitter as a de-politicized space for gaming, dating, and chats (Fuchs 2014: Chapter 8) • Can Twitter be a ‘crossroads of opinion’ in the online public sphere?

4. Saint PetersburgState University Public Sphere in Russia and in Germany • Russia in 21st century is a fundamentally fragmented society (Zubarevich2011, 2013): «Four Russias» • Bodrunova, Litvinenko 2013: formation of the public counter-sphere in Russia of 2008-2012 • Germany, in these terms, has developed a more solid society, with the differences between Eastern and Western part gradually diminishing in many terms; the only striking similarity is huge urban migrant population from the southern direction still under-represented in the media content. Germany has a large number of citizens with migrant background and big diasporas, e.g. Turkish- and Russian-speaking communities which, in terms of media use, often differ from national average indicators (Sauer 2010)

5. Saint PetersburgState University Project «Political agendasin hybrid media systems» • Research team: Svetlana Bodrunova, Dmitry Gavra, Anna Litvinenko, Alena Savizkaya, Anna Smolyarova,AlexandrYakunin • Research upon structural and framing features of Twitter discussions in Russia and Germany • Roles of media accounts in discussions upon polarizing issues • overall mediatization • linkages between media and non-media accounts (the ‘crossroads’ issue) • A case of social polarization: anti-migrant bashings in Biryulyovodistrict of Moscow in October 2013 • A ‘calm’period in Russiaand in Germany (March 2014)

6. Saint PetersburgState University Mixed methodology • Web crawling based on pre-selected hashtags • Frame analysis based on coding of tweets • Descriptive statistics • Discourse analysis (including semantic groups of lexicon and their interpretation)

7. Saint PetersburgState University Time-series graphs

8. Saint PetersburgState University • STRUCTURE OF THE DISCUSSION:results of web crawling

9. Saint PetersburgState University Web graph: Russia, Biryulyovo • political actors • media • ordinary users • fake/spam

10. Web-graph: Germany • Political actors • Media • Ordinary users • NGOs

11. Web-graph: Russia • Political actors • Media • Ordinary users • Nationalist users • Official accounts • NGOs • Spin-doctoring(!)

12. Saint PetersburgState University • FEATURES OF THE DISCOURSE 15% of tweeets put blame on someone Just ONE tweet of 673 tells ‘it is the whole society to be blamed’ 10% contain nationalist speech 11% contain hate speech

13. Saint PetersburgState University • Features of the discourse: • discussion topics

14. Saint PetersburgState University • Features of the discourse: • Tweeters’ mood

15. Saint PetersburgState University • Features of the discourse: • Tweeters’ mood

16. Saint PetersburgState University Polarizationofthepublicsphere on Twitter

17. Saint PetersburgState University • Features of the discourse: origins of discussants

18. Saint PetersburgState University • Features of the discourse: who is to be blamed? 15% = 100 tweets

19. Saint PetersburgState University Semantic analysis:First 600 stems from the word dataset

20. Saint PetersburgState University • MEDIATIZATION OF THE DISCUSSION

21. Saint PetersburgState University • Mediatization of the discussion: media dominate in N of tweets

22. Saint PetersburgState University Some results in hashtagging • mediatization really high:«breaking news», «news», «novosti», «they say that…», «RIA», «media», «Lifenews», «RT» • national-level political actors: Putin, ‘United Russia’ party, Navalny, Public Chamber • scarce aspect thinking: introduction of visas, football • other issues: LGBT; corruption.

23. Saint PetersburgState University ‘Discussion triggers’ • mediatization: both real and fake! • media of various Russian public spheres • nationalists outperform migrants • the role of Public Chamber

24. Saint PetersburgState University Positionsofmedia in thediscussion

25. Saint PetersburgState University Tweeted media content vs. involved media content N = 677 tweets

26. Saint PetersburgState University Conclusion • Twitter in Russia shows a bigger potential for becoming a real "crossroads of opinions", in contrast to the Russian Facebook where anti-governmental discourse predominates, as well as to Vkontakte where political debate is much less noticeable and is encapsulated in closed-up communities. BUT under-representation of migrant community in Twitter obstacles this. • In Russian Twitter, hybrid pro-elite media dominate represented by lifenews_ru, izvestia_ru, pravda.ru, RT_russia, onlinekpru etc., although the anti-mainstreem media are also among influencers (GraniTweet, SvobodaRadio, MaloverjanBBC, ru_rbc). • In general, the case study supported hypothesis about the different role of Twitter in different socio-political contexts.

27. Thank you for your attention!