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      Tweeting the Russian revolution: RT’s #1917LIVE and social media re-enactments as public diplomacy

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      European Journal of Cultural Studies
      SAGE Publications

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          Abstract

          Throughout 2017, the Russian state broadcaster, RT (formerly Russia Today), commemorated the centenary of the 1917 revolution with a social media re-enactment. Centred on Twitter, the 1917LIVE project involved over 90 revolution-era characters tweeting in real time as if the 1917 revolution was happening live on social media. This article is based on an analysis of a sample of tweets by users who engaged with 1917LIVE, alongside focus group discussions with its followers. We argue that a cultural studies perspective can shed important light on the political significance of RT’s social media re-enactment in ways that current studies of public diplomacy as a soft power resource often fail to do. It can advance soft power theory by offering a more nuanced, dynamic analysis of how state media mobilise, and how audiences engage with, social media re-enactments as commemorative events. We find that rather than promoting a unitary propagandistic narrative about Russia, 1917LIVE served instead to soften attitudes towards RT itself – encouraging audiences to view RT as an educator and entertainer as well as a news broadcaster – normalising its presence as a Russian public diplomacy resource in the international news media landscape. Our analysis of audience interactions with and interpretations of 1917LIVE affords insights into how the 1917 re-enactment worked as didactic entertainment eliciting affective identification with the characters of the revolution. Such public diplomacy projects contribute in the short term to a strengthening of the engagement required to create longer-term soft power effects.

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              Analyzing Qualitative Data

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                European Journal of Cultural Studies
                European Journal of Cultural Studies
                SAGE Publications
                1367-5494
                1460-3551
                June 2020
                October 05 2019
                June 2020
                : 23
                : 3
                : 354-373
                Affiliations
                [1 ]The Open University, UK
                Article
                10.1177/1367549419871353
                8bc05529-d133-48c5-9121-8a57944be2c0
                © 2020

                http://journals.sagepub.com/page/policies/text-and-data-mining-license

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