Mediated Public Diplomacy and RT on Instagram: Role of International Institutions, Audience Engagement, and Online Account Bans

Abstract

Changes in the global media environment now challenge relationships between and within states. To expand understandings of mediated public diplomacy, this study examined 13,500 Instagram posts distributed on RT’s non-Russian accounts from September 2021–September 2022. It used LDA to identify RT topics across language accounts, explored the topics’ relation to UN statehood, examined audience engagement levels, and compared their frequency before and after major bans on RT content. The study found that more than two-thirds of the top 30 topics had direct relevance to the statehood frame. RT’s language accounts did employ unique audience-targeting strategies and situation-dependent emphases linked to the timing of their banned content, but the approaches varied according to which of the four statehood criteria were under discussion. High levels of audience engagement for statehood-related posts linked to each of the statehood definitional characteristics, but did not correspond to the frequency of the posted content. The study concludes with implications for mediated public diplomacy theory.