The Ghosts Navalny Met: Russian YouTube-Sphere in Check

Abstract

The disrupted Russian media ecosystem facilitates the flourishing of political blogging on social media; the political communication expands beyond the over-controlled, institutionalised channels of political interaction. This paper maps the activity on YouTube, incorporating media and communication studies to the analysis of a hybrid political regime to answer the following research question: What representations of Navalny are available in the Russian YouTube-sphere? The analysis of a statistically random sample of 366 videos associated with the keyword “Navalny” works in two phases: image type analysis and narrative analysis. Both phases help to identify the traditional institutionalised political actors in the spillovers of political communication trends in the YouTube-sphere. This work not only enriches and updates the current understanding of the Russian political communication ecosystem, but also helps expand the research on contemporary quasi-democratic political scenarios and the communicative strategies of their legitimisation.