There can be only one truth: Ideological segregation and online news communities in Ukraine

Urman, Aleksandra; Makhortykh, Mykola

doi:10.1177/17427665211009930

Cited by 4 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…2020 ). With their interpretative and often confrontational style, ideologically guided coverage is linked to increases in partisanship and affective polarisation ( Levendusky 2013 ; Urman and Makhortykh 2021 ). This is a pattern that persisted throughout the pandemic, with recent studies highlighting the relationship of online partisan media to pandemic incompliance, including increased vaccine skepticism, reduced social distancing and mask wearing, as well as misinformation belief ( Ash et al 2020 ; Bursztyn et al 2020 ; Elıas and Catalan-Matamoros 2020 ).…”

Section: Theoretical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Therefore, these sites have often served as safe havens for radicalized opinions and disinformation (Pennycook and Rand 2019) Their anti-establishment "corrective" reporting did not change with the pandemic: the mix of journalism and political activism followed previously identified patterns of exaggerating threats, being highly critical of public institutions and established political actors, as well as promoting COVID-19 conspiracies (Boberg et al 2020;Motta et al 2020). With their interpretative and often confrontational style, ideologically guided coverage is linked to increases in partisanship and affective polarisation (Levendusky 2013;Urman and Makhortykh 2021). This is a pattern that persisted throughout the pandemic, with recent studies highlighting the relationship of online partisan media to pandemic incompliance, including increased vaccine skepticism, reduced social distancing and mask wearing, as well as misinformation belief (Ash et al 2020;Bursztyn et al 2020;Elıas and Catalan-Matamoros 2020).…”

Section: Media Consumption and Political Trustmentioning

confidence: 99%

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News, Threats, and Trust: How COVID-19 News Shaped Political Trust, and How Threat Perceptions Conditioned This Relationship

León

Makhortykh

Gil‐López

et al. 2022

The International Journal of Press/Politics

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This study explores shifts in political trust during the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Switzerland, examining the role that media consumption and threat perceptions played in individuals’ trust in politics. We combine panel surveys taken before and during the first nation-wide lockdown with webtracking data of participants' online behaviour to paint a nuanced picture of media effects during the crisis. Our work has several findings. First, political trust, an attitude known for its stability, increased following lockdown. Second, consumption of mainstream news on COVID-19 directly hindered this increase, with those reading more news having lower over-time trust, while the relatively minor alternative news consumption had no direct effect on political trust. Third, threat perceptions a) to health and b) from the policy response to the pandemic, have strong and opposite effects on political trust, with threats to health increasing trust, and threats from the government policy response decreasing it. Lastly, these threat perceptions condition the effect of COVID-19 news consumption on political trust: perceptions of threat had the power to both exacerbate and mute the effect of media consumption on government trust during the pandemic. Notably, we show that the expected negative effect of alternative news on political trust only exists for those who did not think COVID-19 posed a threat to their health, while public service news consumption reduced the negative effect produced by government threat perceptions. The paper therefore advances our understanding of the nuanced nature of media effects, particularly as relates to alternative media, especially during moments of crisis.

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Section: Theoretical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Media Consumption and Political Trustmentioning

confidence: 99%

News, Threats, and Trust: How COVID-19 News Shaped Political Trust, and How Threat Perceptions Conditioned This Relationship

León

Makhortykh

Gil‐López

et al. 2022

The International Journal of Press/Politics

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“…Second, our observations demonstrate the possibility of profound information inequalities forming between the users of Russia's two largest search engines. While the mere presence of such inequalities is not unexpected, especially in the context of the increasingly fragmented and polarized Eastern European digital ecosystems (Urman, 2019;Urman & Makhortykh, 2021a), the empirical evidence of their amplification by algorithmic mechanisms is concerning. Considering that these inequalities in the case of Smart Voting (and, potentially, other political matters in the region) are subjected to political bias, such amplification may encase Yandex and Google users into platform-wide filter bubbles (Pariser, 2011), in particular as the Russian search market is roughly split between Google and Yandex (Statscounter, 2021).…”

Section: Figure 2 Share Of Content Removed By Google In Response To T...mentioning

confidence: 99%

A story of (non)compliance, bias, and conspiracies: How Google and Yandex represented Smart Voting during the 2021 parliamentary elections in Russia

2022

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On 3 September 2021, the Russian court forbade Google and Yandex to display search results for “Smart Voting,” the query referring to a tactical voting project by the jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. To examine whether the two search engines complied with the court order, we collected top search outputs for the query from Google and Yandex. Our analysis demonstrates the lack of compliance from both engines; however, while Google continued prioritizing outputs related to the opposition’s web resources, Yandex removed links to them and, in some cases, promoted conspiratorial claims aligning with the Russian authorities’ anti-Western narrative.

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“…The study of Makhortykh and Sydorova (2017) is one of the few empirical analyses of VK data in the context of political communication. A few other analyses include the examination of proand anti-Maidan groups on VK in 2013-2014 (Gruzd & Tsyganova, 2015),; analyses of online news consumption patterns on VK in Russia (Urman, 2019) and Ukraine (Urman & Makhortykh, 2021); a study on the effect of VK ban in Ukraine (Golovchenko, 2022) and; an examination of VK-based communication in relation to protest mobilization (Poupin, 2021). Yet, the platform remains understudied especially given its prominence in the post-Soviet space: VK was one of the most popular social media platforms in Ukraine until the Ukrainian government blocked it in 2017 (Golovchenko, 2022), and remains the most popular social media platform in Russia with over 50 million Russian users accessing the platform daily as of July 2022 (Yuzbekova, 2022).…”

Section: Platform Selection: Vkmentioning

confidence: 99%

My war is your special operation: Engagement with pro- and anti-regime framing of the war in Ukraine on Russian social media

Urman¹,

Makhortykh²

2022

Preprint

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On 24 February 2022, Russia launched a large-scale invasion of Ukraine which since then has been consistently referred to by the Russian authorities as a special operation and not war. The purpose of this specific framing of the Russian aggression can be attributed to multiple reasons, but among the main advantages it provides to the Kremlin is the emphasis of power inequality between Russia and Ukraine as well as minimizing the concerns of the Russian population about the impact of the war on their lives. However, despite all the Kremlin’s propaganda and censorship efforts, it is still unclear what the dominant framing of the war is among regular Russian internet users and how they engage with different frames used in relation to it. To address this gap, we conducted an automated analysis of over 6 million public posts from VK, the biggest Russian social media platform, published between 14 February 2022 and 24 June 2022 and related to different ways of framing the war as well as the ways users engage with these frames. Our analysis reveals that the invasion was predominantly discussed in connection with the losses in the Russian army, and allusions to WW2 were also common. The users who posted about the war were older than average VK users and tuned in to pro-regime and pro-war content more frequently.

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There can be only one truth: Ideological segregation and online news communities in Ukraine

Cited by 4 publications

References 49 publications

News, Threats, and Trust: How COVID-19 News Shaped Political Trust, and How Threat Perceptions Conditioned This Relationship

News, Threats, and Trust: How COVID-19 News Shaped Political Trust, and How Threat Perceptions Conditioned This Relationship

A story of (non)compliance, bias, and conspiracies: How Google and Yandex represented Smart Voting during the 2021 parliamentary elections in Russia

My war is your special operation: Engagement with pro- and anti-regime framing of the war in Ukraine on Russian social media

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