“We need more clips about Putin, and lots of them:” Russia's state-commissioned online visual culture

Abstract

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.

Social Media, Political Polarization, and Political Disinformation: A Review of the Scientific Literature

“…This type of algorithmic manipulation can also take place within social media platforms, for example with trending topics and hashtags on Twitter and Facebook. The degree of manipulation could serve as an independent tool for measuring disinformation campaign success, particularly valuable for people paying for the campaign, but also for its managers (see Sanovich 2017, and a detailed case study by Fedor & Fredheim 2017).…”

Satirical strikes and deadpanning diplomats: Stiob as geopolitical performance in Russia–US relations

“…Moreover, this humor is dynamic, reactive, emergent, and coproduced, like Russian state ideology itself (Greene and Robertson 2019;Laruelle 2020;Wengle et al 2018). It is influenced by tech and shaped both by new media as well as the new entrepreneurial actors empowered by them (Fedor and Fredheim 2017;Tolz and Teper 2018). 6 First, to probe the distinctive qualities of this trolling, or "baiting" dynamic (Kurtović 2018), I discuss political performativity and morphing forms of humor in the Trump/Putin era, introducing the late-socialist ironic aesthetic stiob.…”

Politics, Activism and Trolling on the Russian Internet

“…Using Navalny, who also played a major role in the 2011-2012 protest movement, as its case study, the paper seeks to explain the shift towards YouTube as a central online platform for political activism in Russia and shed light on how the platform enables and shapes particular forms of engagement and mobilization. Scholarship on the political and societal aspects of YouTube in Russia has thus far examined the role of the platform in, e.g., public scandals (Toepfl 2011); gendered activism (Sperling 2012); and, pro-Putin propaganda (Fedor & Fredheim 2017). The rise of YouTube as primary platform for oppositional politics has yet to be comprehensively studied.…”