Political sentiment and pro-Russian rhetoric on Telegram. Network and discourse analytical findings
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Abstract
Social media are the new central venue for social problems, collective sensitivities and the battle for interpretative sovereignty. For some time now, many extremist political actors have been using this media infrastructure – above all Telegram – to spread their ideology and their view of (global) crises and make them attractive. One current, highly virulent crisis topic is the war in Ukraine and its antagonistic discourse positions. Against this background, we ask: 1. How do right-wing actors present and position themselves on Telegram? 2. How will the Ukraine war be discursively negotiated from a Russian perspective in 2022? To this end, we surveyed a network of 7,999 German-speaking actors and prepared it for critical analysis. Methodologically, we used network analysis and topic modeling on the one hand and sociological discourse analysis on the other. As a result, we were able to identify six dominant topic clusters and four dominant pro-Russian channels. Their news content shows, among other things, an ideological consensus that Russia is not waging a war of aggression, is acting with “peacekeepers” against efforts towards a new world order (“Great Reset”) and that Putin is the greatest “genius of geopolitics”.
Keywords: digital networks, discourse analysis, pro-Russian rhetoric, sociology of knowledge, Telegram, Ukraine war
Bibliography: Schoolmann, Jörg/Ziemann, Andreas: Politische Stimmung und pro-russische Rhetorik auf Telegram. Netzwerk- und diskursanalytische Befunde, ZRex – Zeitschrift für Rechtsextremismusforschung, 2-2025, pp. 255-276.
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