Entertainment interspersed with propaganda: how non-legacy-news accounts deliver explicitly political content to mass audiences on Russia’s most popular social network VK

<p>Previous research on political communication on Russia's most popular social network VK has concluded that most users avoid news by not following legacy-news accounts. In this study, we expand the universe of scrutinized accounts with the most-followed non-legacy-news accounts (>100,000 followers) that regularly publish what we theorize to be ‘explicitly political content’ (EPC; <em>N</em> = 355). We delineate a typology of six types of EPC accounts, calculate their aggregate follower counts, and determine how many of them were still (1) accessible from Russia and (2) publishing Kremlin-critical content in October 2022. Our findings indicate that non-critical accounts attracted 26 times more followers than Kremlin-critical accounts. Entertainment-focused EPC accounts had seven times more followers than legacy-news accounts. As a result, they became the primary means through which non-critical EPC reached news-avoidant mass audiences. We identify three dimensions through which autocrats can interweave propaganda and entertainment and highlight promising research paths.</p>