Tetyana Lokot

The over-exposure to information facilitated by the hybrid media system and social networks is a key factor contributing to the increasing polarization of public opinion on major political issues. The European integration project is one of the major political processes affected by information manipulation and disinformation. In this regard, social networks have become powerful tools for nurturing news siloes or “echo chambers,” influencing people’s perceptions of important political issues in a manner that could have a destabilizing effect on democratic processes and institutions. In this context, the role of media discourses and their circulation among networked publics has become particularly relevant, leading audiences to adopt different views supporting or rejecting the European project. This thematic issue features a range of articles considering how the Europeanization process is impacted by discourses circulating in the hybrid media system or threatened by the destructive dynamics of disinformation and polarization.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has seen the Kremlin mixing its usual external cyber warfare tactics with internet control and information manipulation approaches inspired by its internal networked authoritarian regime. I argue that Russia’s interventions in the information spaces and telecommunications infrastructure in temporarily occupied Ukrainian territories demand greater scrutiny from the domains of internet governance and cyber warfare studies alike. This analysis of the ‘networked authoritarian’ creep of Russia’s censorship and surveillance tactics beyond its borders as a part of its expanding war arsenal enables a comprehensive assessment of the impacts of both kinetic attacks on communications infrastructure and informational attacks on the digital communication space in Ukraine. The analysis also summarises Ukraine’s observed capability for resistance and resilience in the face of Russia’s networked authoritarianism in the context of the war and discusses the implications and lessons from the events of the full-scale invasion for the future rebuilding of Ukraine and for the broader international policymaking community.

Research on news credibility and susceptibility to fake news has overwhelmingly focused on individual and message-level factors explaining why people view some news items as more credible than others. We argue that the consistency of the message’s content with the dominant mainstream narrative can have a powerful explanatory capacity as well, particularly in the domain of international news. We test this hypothesis experimentally using a sample of 8,559 social media users in three post-Soviet countries. Our analyses suggest that the consistency with the dominant narrative increases the perceived credibility of foreign affairs news independently of their veracity. We also demonstrate the moderating role of international conflict, government support, and news language in some national contexts but not others. Finally, we report how the effects of these factors on credibility vary according to whether the news items are real or fabricated and discuss the societal implications of our findings.

This paper examines the practices, performance, and perceptions of the messaging platform Telegram as an actor in the 2020 Belarus protests, using publicly available data from Telegram’s public statements, protest-related Telegram groups, and media coverage. Developing a novel conceptualization of platform actorness, we critically assess Telegram’s role in the protests and examine whether Telegram is seen as playing an active role in Belarusian contentious politics. We find that Telegram’s performance and practices drive citizens to form affective connections to the platform and to perceive Telegram as an ally in their struggle against repressions and digital censorship. Meanwhile, the Belarusian state uses Telegram’s aversion to censorship and content moderation to intervene in contentious politics by co-opting grassroots approaches and mimicking manipulative efforts of other authoritarian regimes. Our conceptual framework is applicable to post-Soviet authoritarian contexts, but can also serve as a useful heuristic for analyzing platform actorness in other regime types.