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The Russian state-funded international broadcaster RT (formerly Russia Today) has attracted much attention as a purveyor of Russian propaganda. To date, most studies of RT have focused on its broadcast, website, and social media content, with little research on its audiences. Through a data-driven application of network science and other computational methods, we address this gap to provide insight into the demographics and interests of RT's Twitter followers, as well as how they engage with RT. Building upon recent studies of Russian state-sponsored media, we report three main results. First, we find that most of RT's Twitter followers only very rarely engage with its content and tend to be exposed to RT's content alongside other mainstream news channels. This indicates that RT is not a central part of their online news media environment. Second, using probabilistic computational methods, we show that followers of RT are slightly more likely to be older and male than average Twitter users, and they are far more likely to be bots. Third, we identify thirty-five distinct audience segments, which vary in terms of their nationality, languages, and interests. This audience segmentation reveals the considerable heterogeneity of RT's Twitter followers. Accordingly, we conclude that generalizations about RT's audience based on analyses of RT's media content, or on vocal minorities among its wider audiences, are unhelpful and limit our understanding of RT and its appeal to international audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout 2017, the Russian state broadcaster, RT (formerly Russia Today), commemorated the centenary of the 1917 revolution with a social media re-enactment. Centred on Twitter, the 1917LIVE project involved over 90 revolution-era characters tweeting in real time as if the 1917 revolution was happening live on social media. This article is based on an analysis of a sample of tweets by users who engaged with 1917LIVE, alongside focus group discussions with its followers. We argue that a cultural studies perspective can shed important light on the political significance of RT's social media re-enactment in ways that current studies of public diplomacy as a soft power resource often fail to do. It can advance soft power theory by offering a more nuanced, dynamic analysis of how state media mobilise, and how audiences engage with, social media re-enactments as commemorative events. We find that rather than promoting a unitary propagandistic narrative about Russia, 1917LIVE served instead to soften attitudes towards RT itself – encouraging audiences to view RT as an educator and entertainer as well as a news broadcaster – normalising its presence as a Russian public diplomacy resource in the international news media landscape. Our analysis of audience interactions with and interpretations of 1917LIVE affords insights into how the 1917 re-enactment worked as didactic entertainment eliciting affective identification with the characters of the revolution. Such public diplomacy projects contribute in the short term to a strengthening of the engagement required to create longer-term soft power effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]