“Propaganda from Below”: Politically Loaded Catchphrases and Irony as a Group-building Tool in Online Communication in and beyond Russia

Abstract

The article examines politically loaded catchphrases and their development and transformation in the discourses of Russian-speaking social media users. It focuses on how propaganda catchphrases, used to transmit political messages, acquire new meanings and applications in online communication, and how this process is shaped by the specific context of the Baltic states, where the Russian population underwent minoritization after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The data was collected in the course of longitudinal (2021–2025) ethnographic online observation, primarily from posts and comments in public Facebook groups localized in Estonia. Applying conversational analysis of online data, the article investigates the life cycle of specific words and phrases to show how they evolve into complex indexical signs and even systems of signs used to define not only the referenced objects but also the speaking subjects, their audiences, and the sets of ideas they tend to identify with. Using them as discourse devices, Baltic Russian speakers in their public online communication oppose the official discourses of their respective states; in doing so, however, they do not simply transmit the Kremlin propaganda, but rather creatively repurpose local discourses and contexts, building echo chambers of their own.