TY - JOUR

T1 - Social Media and Political Dissent in Russia and Belarus

T2 - An Introduction to the Special Issue

AU - Bodrunova, Svetlana S.

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © The Author(s) 2021.

PY - 2021/12

Y1 - 2021/12

N2 - The special issue focuses on the roles of socially mediated communication in expressing, aggregating, and shaping political dissent and discontent in Russia and Belarus at the borderline between the 2010s and 2020s. Lately, these post-Soviet countries have demonstrated the growth of restrictive trends in both politics and the public sphere reciprocated by increasing street protest and online polarization. The six papers of the special issue come from the Seventh Annual Conference “Comparative Media Studies in Today’s World” of April 2019. They address the differences between autocracies and democracies in the impact of social media on protest participation, appearance of critical publics, and new media-like gatekeepers on YouTube, Instagram, VKontakte, and other platforms, and cumulative patterns in socially mediated deliberation. The papers demonstrate various manifestations of political disagreement, critique, and moral struggle, including politicization of the mundane, accumulation of self-criticism, and alternation of media consumption habits, thus uncovering the post-Soviet public spheres as vibrant and diverse, even if polarized and constrained.

AB - The special issue focuses on the roles of socially mediated communication in expressing, aggregating, and shaping political dissent and discontent in Russia and Belarus at the borderline between the 2010s and 2020s. Lately, these post-Soviet countries have demonstrated the growth of restrictive trends in both politics and the public sphere reciprocated by increasing street protest and online polarization. The six papers of the special issue come from the Seventh Annual Conference “Comparative Media Studies in Today’s World” of April 2019. They address the differences between autocracies and democracies in the impact of social media on protest participation, appearance of critical publics, and new media-like gatekeepers on YouTube, Instagram, VKontakte, and other platforms, and cumulative patterns in socially mediated deliberation. The papers demonstrate various manifestations of political disagreement, critique, and moral struggle, including politicization of the mundane, accumulation of self-criticism, and alternation of media consumption habits, thus uncovering the post-Soviet public spheres as vibrant and diverse, even if polarized and constrained.

KW - authoritarian publics

KW - Belarus

KW - cumulative deliberation

KW - Instagram

KW - political dissent

KW - Russia

KW - YouTube

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85121370267&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1177/20563051211063470

DO - 10.1177/20563051211063470

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:85121370267

VL - 7

JO - Social Media + Society

JF - Social Media + Society

SN - 2056-3051

IS - 4

ER -