Investigating Independence vs. Control: Agenda-Setting in Russian News Coverage on Social Media
Annerose Eichel, Gabriella Lapesa, Sabine Schulte Walde
Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 5314–5323, 2022.
Abstract
Agenda-setting is a widely explored phenomenon in political science: powerful stakeholders (governments or their financial supporters) have control over the media and set their agenda: political and economical powers determine which news should be salient. This is a clear case of targeted manipulation to divert the public attention from serious issues affecting internal politics (such as economic downturns and scandals) by flooding the media with potentially distracting information. We investigate agenda-setting in the Russian social media landscape, exploring the relation between economic indicators and mentions of foreign geopolitical entities, as well as of Russia itself. Our contributions are at three levels: at the level of the domain of the investigation, our study is the first to substructure the Russian media landscape in state-controlled vs. independent outlets in the context of strategic distraction from negative economic trends; at the level of the scope of the investigation, we involve a large set of geopolitical entities (while previous work has focused on the U.S.); at the qualitative level, our analysis of posts on Ukraine, whose relationship with Russia is of high geopolitical relevance, provides further insights into the contrast between state-controlled and independent outlets.Links
BibTeX
@inproceedings{eichel23_lrec,
title = {Investigating Independence vs. Control: Agenda-Setting in Russian News Coverage on Social Media},
author = {Eichel, Annerose and Lapesa, Gabriella and im Walde, Sabine Schulte},
year = {2022},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC)},
pages = {5314–5323},
preprint = {}
}