The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917-1929

McClelland, James C.; Kenéz, Péter

doi:10.2307/1860024

Cited by 5 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…The regime saw the media as danger to be tightly controlled, with only select elites permitted access to objective news or to foreign publications (Soldatov & Borogan, 2015). As such, the Soviet Union was widely acknowledged as employing strategic communication and reaping the benefits in both the domestic and the foreign realms (Glantz, 1988), as well as utilizing agitation and propaganda to mobilize its population (Kenez, 1985). Strategic communication can be defined as the use of various measures or tactics with the purpose of influencing other actors' decisions and actions to achieve policy objectives (Godzimirski & Østevik, 2018).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“As Reliable as a Kalashnikov Rifle”: How Sputnik News Promotes Russian Vaccine Technologies in the Turkish Twittersphere

Furman

Gürel

Sivaslıoğlu

2023

Social Media + Society

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Established in 2014, SputnikTR (a localized version of Sputnik News) is the most popular pro-Russian media outlet active in Turkey. The news content published by SputnikTR’s Twitter account currently attracts the highest engagement rates among the international public broadcasters active in Turkey. SputnikTR’s official Twitter account has more followers (1M) than Sputnik News English (326K). This article argues that SputnikTR’s Twitter account is used to promote Russian vaccine technologies in Turkey. We believe that it is also a conduit for the dissemination of pro-Russian as well as anti-Western narratives to the Turkish online public. Using a computational methodology, we collected 2,782 vaccine-related tweets posted by SputnikTR’s Twitter account between April 2019 and April 2021. We deployed framing as well as critical discourse analysis to study the contents of our dataset. Our findings suggest that SputnikTR uses (a) disinformation as well as misinformation in vaccine-related news and (b) unethical communication techniques to maximize engagement with content posted on Twitter. Our findings are significant insofar as they are the first documented instances of Russian propaganda efforts on Turkish Twitter. These efforts seem to be focused on promoting the Russian vaccine while encouraging public hesitancy toward Western vaccine technologies.

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Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“As Reliable as a Kalashnikov Rifle”: How Sputnik News Promotes Russian Vaccine Technologies in the Turkish Twittersphere

Furman

Gürel

Sivaslıoğlu

2023

Social Media + Society

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“…However, despite recognizing the divergent propagandist styles available to autocratic states, the conventional assumption persists that state propaganda only takes one monolithic style and delivers desired messages in one unified tone at any given moment (Ellul, 1973; Kenez, 1985; Silverstein, 1987). Little attention has been paid to how the style of state propaganda may vary at precarious political moments, such as major policy reversals, according to the specific policy area, the level of the media venue, and the demographic composition of the targeted audience.…”

Section: Strategic Propaganda and Discursive Engineeringmentioning

confidence: 99%

Greasing the wheels of policy reversal: Discursive engineering and public opinion management during the relaxation of China's family planning policy

Yan

2023

Governance

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How do autocratic regimes use political propaganda to facilitate policy reversals of major significance? In this article, we demonstrate how the authoritarian regime in China dynamically uses propaganda to accomplish rapid discursive shifts in the context of major policy changes. Using a structural topic model for unsupervised machine learning to analyze extensive propaganda materials, we explore how the Chinese Communist Party facilitated the reversal of its One‐Child Policy in 2015 by deploying a systematic, precise, multi‐dimensional, and multi‐layered discursive engineering project. Our findings demonstrate that instead of a monolithic and rigid operation, China's state propaganda is a strategic and flexible discursive engineering project tailored to contingent factors, such as the nature of the policy being advocated, the level of the propaganda venue, and the needs, mentality, and tastes of carefully targeted audiences. This coordinated maneuver of state narrative is key for the effective and smooth policy reversal of major significance.

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“…(Plekhanov, 1891(Plekhanov, /1983 In Plekhanov's thinking, propaganda aims to form people's opinions and attitudes, while agitation is forming people's actions (see also Kremer & Martov, 1896/1983. Agitation and propaganda were then put into practice as tools of mass mobilisation and paved the way for the rise of the "propaganda state" of the Soviet Union (Kenez, 1985). The two concepts were combined in the practice of agitprop (agitation propaganda), a concept coined in the 1920s, following the Russian Revolution, and engaging the medium of film for its purposes.…”

Section: The Rise Of Propaganda As a Phenomenon And Research Areamentioning

confidence: 99%

The return of propaganda: Historical legacies and contemporary conceptualisations

Bolin

Kunelius

2023

Nordic Journal of Media Studies

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In this introductory article, we discuss the rise of the “classical” theories of propaganda, starting with an historical exposé of the concept, which traces its roots and trajectory through the field of academic analysis. Propaganda is then discussed in relation to other adjacent concepts such as soft power, public diplomacy, nation branding, fake news, and so on. In a third section, the concept of propaganda is discussed in relation to the present datafied world, marked by various forms of crises – of democracy and of the environment, for example. In the last section, the articles included in this themed issue are presented and related to the preceding historical and conceptual discussion.

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The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917-1929

Cited by 5 publications

References 0 publications

“As Reliable as a Kalashnikov Rifle”: How Sputnik News Promotes Russian Vaccine Technologies in the Turkish Twittersphere

“As Reliable as a Kalashnikov Rifle”: How Sputnik News Promotes Russian Vaccine Technologies in the Turkish Twittersphere

Greasing the wheels of policy reversal: Discursive engineering and public opinion management during the relaxation of China's family planning policy

The return of propaganda: Historical legacies and contemporary conceptualisations

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