The Economy and Public Diplomacy: An Analysis of RT's Economic Content and Context on Facebook

TL;DR

This study analyzes RT's Facebook content over five years, revealing how economic topics are strategically used in public diplomacy and are influenced by offline economic indicators like currency and oil prices.

Contribution

It provides a computational analysis linking offline economic indicators with online economic content in RT's public diplomacy efforts across multiple languages.

Findings

RT uses economic topics to reinforce messages and target audiences.

Economic content varies with currency and oil price fluctuations.

The study demonstrates a strategic link between offline economic indicators and online messaging.

Abstract

With globalization's rise, economic interdependence's impacts have become a prominent factor affecting personal lives, as well as national and international dynamics. This study examines RT's public diplomacy efforts on its non-Russian Facebook accounts over the past five years to identify the prominence of economic topics across language accounts. Computational analysis, including word embeddings and statistical methods, investigates how offline economic indicators, like currency values and oil prices, correspond to RT's online economic content changes. The results demonstrate that RT uses message reinforcement associated economic topics as an audience targeting strategy and differentiates their use with changing currency and oil values.