Resumen de Elaboració d'una narrativa estatal estratègica a twitter. Estudi de cas de les converses de notícies de temàtica lgtb a rússia
This thesis combines ‘state strategic narrative’ theory from the intersection of communication and international relations studies with research on media and social networks. It takes as a case study the construction and deconstruction of the Russian ‘state narrative’ on Twitter around news on the LGBT community. Methodologically, it uses mixed qualitative and quantitative methods. The research blends Social Network Analysis (SNA), qualitative content analysis with human coding, computational text analysis (topic modelling), and qualitative semi-structured interviews so that each stage complements every other, and each answers our research questions. The main objective of this study is to explore the construction of the strategic ‘state narrative’ on Twitter around news on LGBT issues in a competitive authoritarianism country. The central conclusions are that the ‘state narrative’ is present in Twitter discussions and is being used by state actors such as pro-government media accounts. Exploiting the ‘state narrative’ on LGBT is also dependent on Twitter users’ pro-government political affiliation, although the dependency is more significant for the media. Our findings demonstrate that ‘state narrative’ construction istaking place not only in official state sources but also on social networks such as Twitter. Moreover, our research indicates that the ‘state narrative’ is simultaneously also being questioned and deconstructed by Twitter users. The study also suggests that the use of the ‘state narrative’ by media accounts on Twitter may be connected to both external restrictive intervention by the state and internal editorial policies and self-censorship.
