The Saami webcommunities in the eyes of moderators (on the example of “VKontakte” social network)

The article discusses the problem of moderation of ethnic network communities on the example of the Sami virtual groups “VKontakte”. An expert survey was conducted with moderators of webcommunities, on the basis of which the goals of creating groups, their main functions and prospects for further development were determined. According to the interviewed moderators, the priority goal of creating these groups is to unite representatives of the Sami people on a single, albeit virtual platform, within which certain individual and collective interests can be realized (searching for like-minded people, gaining knowledge, a sense of common ethnicity, etc.). Among the main functions of the Sami webcommunities, the moderators single out those that are inherent in such virtual ethnic associations: communicative, integrative, information-cognitive, entertainment and a number of others. The moderators consider the most important topics for dissemination to such topics as the preservation of the Sami language and culture (including a significant part of the content related to material culture), environmental problems and traditional crafts. At the same time, it is noted that the greatest response from the audience of these groups is received by posts devoted to art, entertainment and everyday life topics. Moderators carefully monitor the thematic focus of the content and try to avoid various “sensitive” topics and discussions, especially those related to politics. The audience of the Sami online communities is assessed by the moderators as conflict-free, but at the same time not active enough. In general, the moderators highly appreciate the technological capabilities of social networks for disseminating relevant information, establishing contacts, self-presentation, socializing Sami youth, broadcasting their culture and expressing ethnic identity.

Evolution of topics and hate speech in retweet network communities

Twitter data exhibits several dimensions worth exploring: a network dimension in the form of links between the users, textual content of the tweets posted, and a temporal dimension as the time-stamped sequence of tweets and their retweets. In the paper, we combine analyses along all three dimensions: temporal evolution of retweet networks and communities, contents in terms of hate speech, and discussion topics. We apply the methods to a comprehensive set of all Slovenian tweets collected in the years 2018–2020. We find that politics and ideology are the prevailing topics despite the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic. These two topics also attract the highest proportion of unacceptable tweets. Through time, the membership of retweet communities changes, but their topic distribution remains remarkably stable. Some retweet communities are strongly linked by external retweet influence and form super-communities. The super-community membership closely corresponds to the topic distribution: communities from the same super-community are very similar by the topic distribution, and communities from different super-communities are quite different in terms of discussion topics. However, we also find that even communities from the same super-community differ considerably in the proportion of unacceptable tweets they post.

Formation of new identities in the post-Soviet space: between the real and the digital world

The purpose of the article is to identify the role, specifics, trends and conditions of the digital and real social environment in the formation of new identities in the post-Soviet space. In this work, the mechanics of identification is closely linked with the factor of activity of historical, political and cultural figures. The methodological basis was the principles of quantitative content analysis, as well as the capabilities of the Google Trends system. The conclusions indicate that with the processes of digitalization and the development of social networks, a bottom-up model is added to the previous identification practices, when such new opinion leaders as bloggers, vloggers, streamers, administrators and top members of network communities themselves create a message, begin to interpret historical facts in their own way, and political events, conveying their vision to the audience they are interested in. The range of risks and threats of digitalization for building the macropolitical identities of the post-Soviet countries has been determined. The theoretical significance of the work is determined by the fact that the discovered interest among Russian-speaking researchers in such types of identity as social, ethnic, cultural, national and civic quite correlates with the increased interest in these phenomena on the part of Internet users of post-Soviet countries. It is indicated that a flexible combination of traditional and network technologies for the formation of identities makes us speak of them as techniques of soft or even smart power.

Sociocultural Aspects of Gender Conflict in Radical Network Communities of Runet (Based on Field Research)

Актуальность рассматриваемой проблемы обусловлена необходимостью междисциплинарного осмысления набирающего популярность среди российской аудитории феномена - мизандрии и мизогинии, наиболее заметно представленного в виртуальном пространстве. Авторами было проведено эмпирическое исследование с использованием методов глубинного интервью и включенного наблюдения в сообществах радикальной гендерной направленности, которые брендированны как «Радфем» [1], «ФемКызлар» [2], «Мужское государство» [3], артикулирующих радикальные социокультурные и социально-политические концепты. Исследование проводилось с 2020 года по август 2021 года. На основании проведенного анализа, авторы приходят к выводу, что гендерный конфликт становится одним из наиболее распространенных видов виртуальной социальной агрессии. Его содержательная «повседневность» и эксплицитная коммуникативная форма, позволяют использовать данный вид социального конфликта как рамочную конструкцию для создания деструктивных идеологем, формирующих в количественно значимых демографических группах атмосферу неприятия и ксенофобии с целью повышения уровня социальной аномии в обществе, дискредитации традиционных культурных норм, нанесения морального и психологического урона различным социокультурным группам и их отдельным представителям. Данные особенности гендерного конфликта ставят перед научным сообществом серьезные исследовательские и практические задачи. The relevance of this problem is due to the need for an interdisciplinary understanding of the phenomenon of misandry and misogyny in the virtual space. The authors conducted their own empirical research using the methods of in-depth interviews and included observation in communities of radical gender orientation, which are branded as " Radfem" [1], "FemKyzlar" [2], "Men's State" [3], speaking with ultra-radical socio-political slogans. The study was conducted from 2020 to July 2021. Based on the analysis, the authors come to the conclusion that gender conflict is becoming one of the most common types of virtual aggression. Its meaningful "everyday life" and explicit communicative form allow us to use this type of social conflict as a framework for creating destructive ideologies, the formation of aggression and xenophobia in order to increase the level of social anomie in society, discredit traditional cultural norms, cause physical or moral and psychological damage to various social groups or individuals. These features of the gender conflict pose serious research and practical tasks for the scientific communities.

LOL-Trasianka: what Language do the Belarus Network Communities Use?

The article is devoted to LOL-trasianka – a network variety of mixed Belarus-Russian speech, which is actively used in Belarus Internet communities as a source of comic and a trigger for laughing communicative situations. It was found that laughter discourse in LOL-trasianka is characterized by deliberate distortion of the norms of both Russian and Belarus languages, hypertrophied interference, violation of ethical and etiquette rules of communication, demonstrative marginalization of the speech flow, general intention of irony and sarcasm. Sociolinguistic and communicative-discursive factors that determined the status of LOL-trasianka as the main code resource of Internet communities with an ironic-grotesque discourse of a socially critical orientation are a) stereotypes of marking the state Russian and Belarus languages and their variants; b) strengthening the symbolic function of the Belarus language; c) disdainful attitude towards mixed Belarus-Russian speech; d) expanding the scope of use of trasianka. It was found that in the communicative interaction of participants in the analyzed communities, LOL-trasianka performs a number of functions: creative (is a means of self-expression of participants), emotional expressive (allows the writer to convey a palette of emotions), integrative (unites members of the online community), identification (provides adequate perception and understanding each other’s intentions), interpretive (forms an alternative laughing reality), dissociative (expresses the protest of community members, dissatisfaction with the surrounding reality).