Telegram as a Means of Political Communication and its use by Russia’s Ruling Elite

Abstract

This article examines the use of Telegram as a means of political communication by the ruling political elite in Russia (both external, i.e., communication with the society and other political forces, and internal, i.e., between different, often rival, groups within the elite itself). While Telegram is illegal at the official level, and attempts have been made to block it in Russia since April 2018, unofficially the Russian authorities continue to actively use Telegram channels for political communication and influencing public opinion as well as for monitoring the mood of the public. What is the reason for this ambivalent attitude toward Telegram? What makes it so attractive for the Russian establishment? How are the authorities using Telegram for their own purposes? Answering these questions is the main goal of this study.

Production and distribution of media news on Telegram

“…Regarding the use of Telegram in journalism, studies on this instant messaging application as an alternative media channel so far have focused on countries such as Iran (Kermani, 2018) and Russia (Salikov, 2019;Akbari & Gabdulhakov, 2019). Research has also been conducted regarding its use in disseminating news by five local digital media (Negreira-Rey, López-García & Lozano-Aguiar, 2017), its possible impact on newsrooms (Sedano-Amundarain & Palomo-Torres, 2018), news consumption (Lou et al, 2021), and the communication strategies used by the media on this type of platform (Sánchez & Martos-Moreno, 2020).…”

BelElect: A New Dataset for Bias Research from a “Dark” Platform

“…Thus, the intention of the Telegram creator to enable privacy and free speech on the Internet has been successfully used to promote democracy, but also misused by extremist organisations and criminals who cannot publish their content on other, better regulated media channels. In addition to that, Salikov (2019) observes that being the communication channel of the opposition at the beginning, and despite being declared as illegal in Russia, the Telegram platform is heavily used by the Russian authorities in order to monitor public mood and influence (or manipulate) the population.…”

“…While bias detection literature largely focuses on public data, such as Wikipedia (Hube 2017), online newspapers (Kiesel et al 2019) and "traditional" social media such as Twitter (Chun et al 2019;Guimarães, Figueira, and Torgo 2021), Facebook (Choi et al 2017; Moore 2021) and YouTube (Jiang, Robertson, and Wilson 2019), instant messengers such as Telegram, and new social networks, such as TikTok only recently became the subject of scholarly investigation, see for instance (Salikov 2019;Kermani 2020;Urman and Katz 2020;Walther and McCoy 2021) for Telegram and (Medina Serrano, Papakyriakopoulos, and Hegelich 2020) for TikTok. Only rarely do researchers publish the datasets which they use in their studies.…”

“…However, the media themselves are not static; channels and users can choose to delete posts from public channels and groups, and even channels can disappear forever, which is problematic for the academic requirements of research reproducibility also called replication crisis (Cockburn et al 2020). In addition, messengers such as Telegram are often used by actors who prefer to be "in the shadow" -such as extreme right political movements and COVID-19 deniers (Jarynowski et al 2021;Guhl and Davey 2020) but also oppressed political organisations in non-pluralistic systems and democracy defenders (Ameli and Molaei 2020;Kermani 2020;Salikov 2019). Zeng and Schäfer (2021) describe such platforms as "dark" -they are less regulated and promote very much extreme, and even illegal content, but can also provide a safe area to fight for human rights in authoritarian regimes.…”

The Digital Transformation of the Public Sphere, Its Features in the Context of Various Political Regimes, and Its Possible Influence on Political Processes

“…This, for example, can explain the Telegram phenomenon with its channels and semi-closed publics in Russia, Iran, and some other countries, whose users often are very critical of the ruling regime and go negative on it (Akbari, Gabdulhakov, 2019: 223-231), but, with rare exceptions, avoid serious persecution by the authorities. Moreover, the authorities themselves often use social media (Telegram is here a vivid example), both for a kind of intra-elite communication and for the leaking of information that cannot be officially disseminated and for the formation of public opinion (Salikov, 2019).…”