Public agenda fragmentation beyond established democracies: the case of Russian online publics in 2017

ABSTRACT

New media introduce mechanics in the news consumption and deliberation of public agenda capable of disrupting the democratic process's normative assumptions (echo chambers, filter bubbles). However, most research has been concerned with cases from Western Europe and the US. In this paper, we examine the fragmentation of the Russian public sphere online. We build on previous works with evidence on networked connections between segments of the online public sphere. We collected news items (N = 210,197) and metadata of 12 news outlets with offline and online reach posted on the largest Russian-language platform during one year (2017). Following a computational approach based on topic modeling and qualitative reading, we match the network segments with their news agendas. Although we do not find evidence of fragmentation, we find divergencies in their agendas. We discuss these findings and their contribution to the discussion of fragmentation of publics and agendas in the digital environment.

KEYWORDS:

• Public sphere
• social media
• agendas
• Russian media system
• fragmentation

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank anonymous reviewers, Eugenia Lekarevich and Olessia Koltsova for their comments and support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work is an output of a research project implemented as part of the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE University).

Notes on contributors

Sergei Pashakhin

Sergei Pashakhin is a junior research fellow at the Laboratory for Social and Cognitive Informatics and a lecturer at the Department of Sociology with HSE University. His area of study is political communication and computational methods for social sciences.