Anna Litvinenko

Freie Universität Berlin | FUB · Institute for Media and Communication Studies

Previous studies on “youtubification” of political communication (May, 2010) have largely focused on democratic contexts. This study aims at exploring the role of the global video-sharing platform in non-democratic political communication, using the example of the Russian presidential election of 2018. It draws on the qualitative content analysis o...

Extant research on how innovations diffuse among news organizations over time has largely focussed on democratic contexts. By contrast, this is the first longitudinal study to investigate the spread of a participatory newsroom innovation under authoritarian rule. Adopting a multiple case study design, the article reconstructs the histories of comme...

Over the past decades, internet governance has developed in a tug-of-war between the democratic, transnational nature of the web, and attempts by national governments to put cyberspace under control. Recently, the idea of digital sovereignty has started to increasingly gain more supporters among nation states. This article is a case study on the Ru...

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has become a stress test for science journalism worldwide. In this paper, we explore the under-researched topic of the perceived role enactment of science journalists in non-democratic settings in the example of COVID-19 coverage in Russia. Drawing on 23 semi-structured interviews with Russian science journalis...

In this essay, I explore the nature of propaganda in a hybrid media environment through the example of Russian propaganda during the ongoing war in Ukraine. I start by briefly overviewing the Russian media system's development, focusing on the roots of cynical attitude toward journalism in the society. After analyzing propaganda strategies, I sugge...

This paper presents the perspectives on reporting on migrants and refugees in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), Asia, the Americas and the Russian Federation. It is intended to show that the topic of reporting on migration and forced displacement is by no means settled with existing publications, first of all the UNESCO Handbook for Journali...

Little is known presently about how, why, and with what consequences audiences comment on their news in contemporary authoritarian regimes. In order to address this gap, this study leverages recent theorizing about the multiple public sphere under non-democratic rule. Accordingly, critically commenting publics are theorized as “input institutions”...

Today, aggressive verbal behavior is generally perceived as a threat to integrity and democratic quality of public discussions, including those online. However, we argue that, in more restrictive political regimes, communicative aggression may play constructive roles in both discussion dynamics and empowerment of political groups. This might be esp...

Cosmopolitan communication studies: A plea for “deep internationalization” of the discipline in Germany - A policy paper The paper calls for diversifying the discipline in German Communication Studies.

Today’s communicative environment, including the rise of social media, makes journalists perform publicly as both professionals and private citizens. In these circumstances, practices of self-limitation and self-censorship may extend to online behaviour. In this article, we analyse what makes journalists in public affairs media limit themselves in...

This article analyses the digital remembrance of the Russian Revolution in the year of its centenary. It examines what memory narratives about 1917 were constructed by leading Russian online media in 2017, in the absence of an overarching narrative about the event imposed by the state. The authors reveal a multiplicity of digital memories about the...

Studies of political polarization in social media demonstrate mixed evidence for whether discussions necessarily evolve into left and right ideological echo chambers. Recent research shows that, for political and issue-based discussions, patterns of user clusterization may differ significantly, but that cross-cultural evidence of the polarization o...

In response to the massive street protests “For Fair Elections” that shook Russia in 2011/12, the country’s leadership implemented a range of measures aimed at curbing dissent. How, why and with what consequences have Russia’s political elites transformed the country’s media landscape in the years since 2011? In order to answer these questions, thi...

The crisis in Ukraine was one of the dominant topics in international news coverage of 2014 and the following years. Representing a conflict along the lines of an East-Western confrontation unprecedented since the end of the Cold War, the news reporting in different European countries with different historical backgrounds is an essential research t...

The media are normatively expected to play significant roles in conflictual discussions within national and international communities. As previous research shows, digital platforms make scholars rethink these roles based on media behavior in online communicative environments as well as on the structural limitations of the platforms. At the same tim...

Recently, the growing role of social network users in content dissemination has brought to life the concept of secondary gatekeeping – selection and republication of content already selected and published by traditional gatekeepers. Secondary gatekeeping is believed to be raising the media in-platform visibility, but it may also have negative effec...

This study compares how comment sections (CSs) were implemented, as of summer 2016, on the 179 leading national news websites across the 15 post-Soviet countries. In order to pursue this aim, a novel coding scheme is developed that facilitates assessment of the degree to which the discourse architectures of CSs transfer control over the content pub...

Today, a range of research approaches is used to define the so-called influencers in discussions in social media, and one can trace both conceptual and methodological differences in how influencers are defined and tracked. We distinguish between ‘marketing’ and ‘deliberative’ conceptualization of influencers and between metrics based on absolute fi...

With the emergence of discussion platforms like Twitter, the hopes rose that computer-mediated public sphere would become more even in access to discussion than mass-mediatized public sphere of the late 20th century. Scholars have argued that it will eventually form an 'opinion crossroads' where conflicts would be discussed by all the parties invol...

Current social structures can be described more effectively with reference to value orientations, consumer patterns and Internet use rather than classic demographics. This approach to social stratification results into the idea of social milieus more flexible than the picture provided by rigid class categorisations. Social milieus differ in many re...

Since the beginning of 1990s international journalism in the world is faced with new challenges due to a variety of factors, i.e., technology, globalization and economic crisis in media (Sambrook, 2010). In Russia transformation of international journalism is complicated by the existence of the strong Soviet legacy in the field of foreign reporting...

According to a number of scholars, Twitter possesses big potential to become a ‘crossroads of discourses’ due to its openness, de-hierarchization, and spontaneity (Miller 2014, Shirky 2008). At the same time, substantial criticism has risen towards political and deliberative efficacy of Twitter (Fuchs 2013). The authors aim at analyzing the feature...