Investigating Independence vs. Control: Agenda-Setting in Russian News Coverage on Social Media

Annerose Eichel, Gabriella Lapesa, Sabine Schulte im Walde


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.
Anthology ID:
2022.lrec-1.569
Volume:
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
5314–5323
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.569
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Annerose Eichel, Gabriella Lapesa, and Sabine Schulte im Walde. 2022. Investigating Independence vs. Control: Agenda-Setting in Russian News Coverage on Social Media. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 5314–5323, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Investigating Independence vs. Control: Agenda-Setting in Russian News Coverage on Social Media (Eichel et al., LREC 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.569.pdf
Code
 anneroseeichel/agenda-setting