Public discourse in the Russian blogosphere: mapping RuNet politics and mobilization
Bruce Etling (Creator)
This paper analyses Russian blogs to discover networks of discussion around politics and public affairs. With funding from the MacArthur Foundation, the Berkman Center is undertaking a two-year research project to investigate the role of the Internet in Russian society. The study will include a number of interrelated areas of inquiry that contribute to and draw upon the Russian Internet, including the Russian blogosphere, Twitter, and the online media ecology. In addition to investigating a number of core Internet and communications questions, a key goal for the project is to test, refine, and integrate various methodological approaches to the study of the Internet more broadly. This working paper analyses the Russian blogosphere, with an emphasis on politics; it is the project's first public research release. The authors analysed Russian blogs to discover networks of discussion around politics and public affairs. Beginning with an initial set of over five million blogs, the authors used social network analysis to identify a highly active ‘Discussion Core’ of over 11,000. These were clustered according to long term patterns of citations within posts, and the resulting segmentation characterized through both automated and human content analysis. Key findings include: Unlike their counterparts in the US and elsewhere, Russian bloggers prefer platforms that combine features typical of blogs with features of social network services (SNSs) like Facebook. Russian blogging is dominated by a handful of these “SNS hybrids.” While the larger Russian blogosphere is highly divided according to platform, there is a central Discussion Core that contains the majority of political and public affairs discourse. This core is comprised mainly, though not exclusively, of blogs on the LiveJournal platform. The Discussion Core features four major groupings: Politics and Public Affairs (including news-focused discussion, business and finance, social activists, an
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