Suchergebnisse

This study uses quantitative methods to explore how the memory of Katyn is mobilised in political discourse. The scholarly literature on memory conflict tends to see international memory disputes as an expression of a state's interests as a whole; this study analyses when hostile rhetoric is mobilised and finds that in Poland Katyn is invoked as part of an opposition strategy that criticises the incumbent regime for undermining the national interest. Periods of accelerated debate about the significance of Katyn have occurred as political elites sought to achieve specific domestic rather than foreign political goals.

In this article, we examine how the Putin government is attempting to respond and adapt to the YouTube phenomenon and the vibrant oppositional online visual culture on Runet. We show how these processes are giving rise to new forms of state propaganda, shaped and driven above all by the quest for high-ranking search-engine results and the concomitant desire to appeal to the perceived new sensibilities of the Internet generation through the commissioning and production of "viral videos." We focus in particular on the videos created by Iurii Degtiarev, a pioneer in the development of this genre, whose works we explore in light of the "Kremlingate" email leaks, which offer inside information on the strategies and aims being pursued on the online visual front of the campaign to manage the Russian mediascape, and Degtiarev's own reflections on this subject. Examining the output of young creatives patronized by the Kremlin offers a "bottom-up" view to supplement studies of the Russian ideological and media landscape as shaped by "political technologists" such as Vladislav Surkov and Gleb Pavlovskii.

How do identity rules influence online deliberation? We address this question by drawing on a data set of 45 million comments on news articles on the Huffington Post from January 2013 to May 2015. At the beginning of this period, the site allowed commenting under what we call non-durable pseudonyms. In December 2013, Huffington Post moved to regulate its forum by requiring users to authenticate their accounts. And in June 2014, Huffington Post outsourced commenting to Facebook altogether, approximating a 'real-name' environment. We find a significant increase in the cognitive complexity of comments (a proxy for one aspect of deliberative quality) during the middle phase, followed by a decrease following the shift to real-name commenting through Facebook. Our findings challenge the terms of the apparently simple trade-off between the goods and bads of anonymous and real-name environments and point to the potential value of durable pseudonymity in the context of online discussion.