Florian Toepfl

University of Passau · Department of Communication

Previous research on political communication on Russia's most popular social network VK has concluded that most users avoid news by not following legacy-news accounts. In this study, we expand the universe of scrutinized accounts with the most-followed non-legacy-news accounts (>100,000 followers) that regularly publish what we theorize to be ‘expl...

Dieser Beitrag nimmt die wissenschaftliche Forschung zu strategischer Regierungskommunikation in westlichen Demokratien als Ausgangspunkt und erörtert im Anschluss in vergleichender Perspektive, wer in Russlands perso-nalistischer Autokratie als zentrale politische Entscheidungsinstanz über welche Kanäle und auf welche Weise über Russlands Krieg ge...

Extant research on migrants’ media use and trust has delivered mixed evidence on whether, and in which ways, migrants stay loyal to their homeland news media and/or develop trust in host-society media, particularly when the narratives of the two types of media clash. To advance this strand of research, this study scrutinizes how an audience group w...

Extant research on migrants’ media use and trust has delivered mixed evidence on whether, and in which ways, migrants stay loyal to their homeland news media and/or develop trust in host-society media, particularly when the narratives of the two types of media clash. To advance this strand of research, this study scrutinizes how an audience group w...

Extant research on alternative media in Western democracies has focused on scrutinizing their content, organization, production, and audiences. However, the extent to which alternative outlets are linked to powerful foreign actors has not yet been analyzed, despite the fact that a plethora of outlets have openly sided with Russia after its full-sca...

Welcher „Idee“ folgt die Universität und welchem Auftrag ist sie verpflichtet? Diese Fragen von Karl Jaspers 1923, 1946 und 1961 ausdrücklich aufgeworfen, bleiben stets aktuell. Sie müssen im Horizont eines permanenten Wandels immer wieder neu reflektiert werden. Die Antworten nehmen die Universität insgesamt und die jeweils konkrete Hochschule in...

Extant research demonstrated that the algorithms of the Kremlin-controlled search engine Yandex, compared to those of its US-based counterpart Google, frequently produce results that are biased toward the interests of Russia’s ruling elites. Prior research, however, audited Yandex’s algorithms largely within Russia. In contrast, this study is the f...

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, policymakers worldwide have taken measures to curb the reach of Russia’s foreign communication outlets, RT and Sputnik. Mapping the audiences of these outlets in 21 countries, we show that in the quarter before the invasion, at least via their official websites and mobile apps, neither outlet reached more tha...

This article advances extant research that has audited search algorithms for misinformation in four respects. Firstly, this is the first misinformation audit not to implement a national but a cross-national research design. Secondly, it retrieves results not in response to the most popular query terms. Instead, it theorizes two semantic dimensions...

Massive efforts have been dedicated to studying political search engine bias in democratic contexts, and a growing body of literature has scrutinized search engine censorship in authoritarian China. By contrast, very little is known still about political search engine bias within Russia’s slightly more open authoritarian media system. In order to f...

Online astroturfing is a novel form of disinformation that relies on the imitation of citizen voices to create the false impression that a particular view or idea has widespread support in society. In this study, we test if political online astroturfing messages (i.e., forged user comments beneath digital news items) can influence perceptions of pu...

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...

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”...

A defining feature of counterpublics is to claim that their views are deliberately excluded from the mainstream public sphere. This rhetorical strategy – which we theorize as “suppressed voice rhetoric” (SVR) – has become omnipresent in today’s polarized media environments. In this article, we present an experimental study (N = 464) that investigat...

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.

This study is the first to scrutinize the psychological effects of online astroturfing in the context of Russia’s digitally-enabled foreign propaganda. Online astroturfing is a communicative strategy that use-s websites, “sock puppets,” or social bots to create the false impression that a particular opinion has widespread public support. We exposed...

Researchers comparing political communication across non-democratic contexts presently lack a widely acknowledged theoretical framework to guide their efforts. In order to fill in this gap, this essay develops a theoretical account that proposes comparing not authoritarian media systems, but “authoritarian publics.” Drawing on theories of the multi...

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...

In the digital memories literature, the practice of searching for information – one of the most frequent online activities worldwide – has received comparatively little attention. To fill the gap, this exploratory study asks how search engines affect the representations of the past that they produce in query results. Designed as a single revelatory...

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...

This study illustrates how the emphasis structure of counterpublic discourses surfacing online can be predicted by that of the dominant publics that these counterpublics—at the argumentative level—so resolutely oppose. Deploying a single common case study design, the article scrutinizes a counterpublic discourse that surfaced in the comment section...

Over the past decade, an extensive body of literature has emerged on the question of how new communication technologies can facilitate new modes of organizing protest. However, extant research has tended to focus on how digitally-enabled protest operates. By contrast, this study investigates, adopting Bennett and Segerberg’s (2013) threefold typolo...

Extant research on the consequences of the Internet for non-democratic politics has focused on how oppositional activists leverage new digital tools. By contrast, still, relatively little is known about how authoritarian elites proactively deploy digital technologies to legitimize their rule. This article contributes to filling this gap by scrutini...

Many Western researchers have hailed blogs of politicians as new, interactive and 'inherently democratic' tools of political communication. Yet, as this essay illustrates, blogs can be of comparatively even greater appeal to politicians in semi-authoritarian political contexts. In Russia, 29 out of 83 regional leaders (roughly 35%) were keeping a w...

Leading communication scholars have recently called for questions of meaning and ideology to be brought back into comparative media research. This article heeds that call by delineating a discourse approach to the comparative study of media and politics. This discourse approach is introduced with reference to a formerly influential but recently sti...

Research scrutinizing political talk online has been developed largely against the backdrop of deliberative discursive norms and considered political talk without a systematic analysis of surrounding mass-mediated discourses. By contrast, this study operationalizes counter-public theory as an alternative theoretical perspective and analyses comment...

Available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/51686/ Fueled by the Arab spring, the question of how the rise of internet-mediated communication affects authoritarian regimes has received unprecedented attention within the discipline of communications. However, in this debate, scholars have not yet turned to the concept of literacy and addressed the role...

Manuscript available here: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/53148/ A quarter century after the collapse of Communism in the former Eastern bloc, a wide range of scholarly projects have been undertaken to compare and theorize processes of media change in the region. One question that scholars have sought to address is: what were the factors that crucially...

The past 2 decades have seen an increasingly intense debate on how the rise of Internet-mediated communication has impacted politics in (semi)authoritarian regimes. Previous works have adopted a wide array of approaches. Yet, to date no major study has investigated how citizens in these regimes are making sense of political messages they encounter...

The past 2 decades have seen an increasingly intense debate on how the rise of Internet-mediated communication has impacted politics in (semi)authoritarian regimes. Previous works have adopted a wide array of approaches. Yet, to date no major study has investigated how citizens in these regimes are making sense of political messages they encounter...

Many Western researchers have hailed blogs of politicians as new, interactive and ‘inherently democratic’ tools of political communication. Yet, as this essay illustrates, blogs can be of comparatively even greater appeal to politicians in semi-authoritarian political contexts. In Russia, 29 out of 83 regional leaders (roughly 35%) were keeping a w...

Over the past three decades, scholars studying the phenomenon of political scandal have mostly based their works on the premise that scandals can only occur in liberal democracies. Contradictory to this assumption, however, some of the most heavily discussed phenomena in contemporary semi-authoritarian Russia are scandals emanating from the new, vi...