Mass Media Discourse of Internet Regulation in Russia: a Longitudinal Analysis

Broadband Internet access has transformed the everyday lives of people, just like its subsequent regulation did when the governments started to gain control over online communication. The adopted Internet laws often stem from rivaling or succeeding perspectives on rights and freedoms, which produces an overall politicized discourse. While the development of Internet regulation in the US and Europe is rather well researched, this paper analyzes the Russian case. Media serve as a broker between the political system and society, absorbing and articulating different opinions and meanings. Media coverage provides the text data suitable for automated text analysis for detecting continuous and changing topics in the discourse on Internet regulation. This study uses a large corpus of Russian newspapers and magazines published within almost a decade with the goal to map out the major discursive streams on Internet regulation and follow the changes and continuities in their content over time. There were two ruptures in the Russian media discourse on Internet regulation – in 2012, when first Internet regulation laws were passed, and in 2015 when the political discursive stream went into the direction of propaganda and the business stream switched to electronic markets. The proposed strategy of analysis can serve as a working tool for automated text analysis in other languages, providing a reasonable number of data-based streams and enabling a substantive investigation of topics within those streams.