Authors

Discussion

A substantial body of literature on RT (formerly Russia Today) has showcased how the state-controlled media conglomerate promotes “the Russian viewpoint” abroad. Less attention has been paid to RT’s role in the domestic mediascape, and how it filters global news to Russian audiences. Moreover, there is little research studying how this filtering is received and responded to. The present paper addresses this research gap by examining practices of user commentary on RT’s Russian-language platform for foreign news — InoTV. Drawing on scholarship about the participatory affordances of digitally mediated propaganda (e.g. Asmolov, 2019), I show how readers interact with RT’s creative translations and retellings (perevody i pereskazy) of non-Russian news. More than a reverberation room for RT’s narrative, the paper finds that the outlet’s comment sections can serve as discursive battlefields where multiple narratives compete. In this battlefield, RT’s news filtration is itself filtrated, undergoing new and fundamentally user-driven processes of being creatively “translated and retold” to heterogenous interactive publics on the Russian-language Internet.