| Popis: |
What are the mechanisms through which international actors interfere with domestic politics on social media and what makes them successful? We theorize that successful interference unfolds in two stages. First, the outlet needs to reach the audiences. Second, the outlet needs to gain audience trust. We theorize that audience trust can be built on a smaller set of content that is important to the target audience, which is then used to expose the same audiences to other, biased and less trustworthy material. Using the case of Russia's state-funded international broadcaster, RT, we test our theory of successful international interference focusing on the topic of police, which we argue contributes to both reach and trust. We provide evidence of the reach of RT using quantitative analysis of an original dataset of YouTube videos published on the channel from 2015-2017. To test the mechanisms of trust building, we propose a survey experiment where individuals are exposed to 90 second RT America news channel videos twice. In the first round, individuals are randomly exposed to either a liberal, conservative, or control video. In the second round all respondents see the same 90 second clip. We theorize that ideological alignment with the first round video should make individuals more likely to find the outlet trustworthy and to endorse the political stance presented by RT in the second round video. |
