Abstract
While Russia’s international broadcasters (RT and Sputnik) and troll farms have been widely examined, little is known about the foreign public spaces amplifying Russia’s domestic news content, specifically after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. This article examines the types of foreign Facebook spaces that amplified Russia’s domestic news during wartime and how they differed in sharing content from outlets classified as war-critical versus war-uncritical (toward Russia’s war against Ukraine). Analysing 912 non-Russian Facebook public spaces that shared URLs to 70 Russian-language domestic news websites in the first six months of the full-scale war, the authors developed a typology based on ties to Russia and thematic orientation. Their findings reveal three patterns. First, linguistic proximity acts as a dual conduit, circulating both war-uncritical and war-critical news URLs. Second, ideologically aligned and Russia-affiliated spaces function as relatively insulated conduits, almost uniformly amplifying war-uncritical news URLs. Third, spaces linked to former European socialist states tilt toward war-uncritical news URL sharing, though war-critical news URL sharing offsets this imbalance with higher posting intensity. These dynamics show how authoritarian information influence is structured through both targeted supply and audience-driven uptake, extending debates on transnational news dissemination and Russia’s digital information influence.
Keywords
Introduction
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 radically altered the conditions under which Russia’s news circulates on global social networking sites (SNSs). While European regulators and SNS owners introduced restrictions on Kremlin-linked media and Russia itself limited access to several US-based SNSs, Russia’s domestic news content continued to circulate internationally on SNSs (see European Commission, 2023; Kling and Poliakoff, 2025) To examine this persistence, this article investigates through which types of public spaces, and under what conditions Russia’s domestic news continues to travel across borders on SNSs.
Existing research before and after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion on the Russian state’s informational influence on SNSs has predominantly focused on its main foreign broadcasters, RT and Sputnik (e.g. Glazunova et al., 2023; Henriksen et al., 2024; Hutchings et al., 2024; Okholm et al., 2024), and the activities of trolls and bots employed by the Russian state (e.g. DiResta et al., 2022; Doroshenko and Lukito, 2021; Poliakoff and Toepfl, 2026). Work on RT and Sputnik has also begun to shift attention from content supply to downstream audience roles, showing that consumers can function as vehicles for further dissemination of authoritarian messaging in domestic information environments (Wagnsson, 2023). Nevertheless, there is still scant knowledge on what types of foreign SNS spaces amplify specifically Russia’s domestic news.
A notable body of research indicates that Russia’s state-aligned domestic news outlets, too, have reached audiences outside Russia even before Russia’s full-scale invasion. For example, extant research has documented the regular consumption of Russian state-aligned television and online outlets among Russophone minorities abroad, particularly in the Baltic states (Vihalemm and Leppik, 2019). Moreover, Kling (2022) demonstrated that Russia’s domestic news outlets have attracted measurable foreign audiences on Facebook in the month before the full-scale invasion predominantly in former Soviet countries, thus in countries with linguistic and cultural ties to Russia. Building on this pre-(re)invasion baseline and existing research into organised social media manipulation and digital information influence campaigns (Asmolov, 2019; Bradshaw et al., 2021; Litvinenko, 2023), we examine how these patterns evolve after February 2022, and develop a typology of public spaces tailored to wartime conditions. This typology captures both the spaces’ ties to Russia and their thematic orientations, and relates these features to the circulation of content from war-critical and war-uncritical Russian domestic news outlets.
Focusing specifically on transnational amplification, this study analyses 912 foreign (non-Russian) Facebook public spaces (excluding, by design, official outlet pages) that shared URLs from 70 Russian-language domestic news outlets in the first six months after the start of the full-scale invasion using social media and manual content analysis. In this study, “Facebook public spaces” refers to pages, public groups, and verified public profiles whose posts are publicly accessible beyond their immediate followers or members. Private groups and non-verified personal profiles are excluded by design, as their content is not consistently observable for cross-space comparison. We focus on Facebook because: (a) existing research documents that Russian state-aligned media and related audience spaces built measurable cross-border presence on Facebook prior to February 2022 Kling (2022); and (b) in the post-2022 period, Facebook became shaped by both platform enforcement towards Russian state media and Russia’s domestic restrictions on Meta, while remaining observable as a venue where foreign public spaces continued to circulate URLs to Russian domestic news (Kling and Poliakoff, 2025).
Conceptually, we treat Facebook public spaces as issue-organised networked publics within a fragmented “network of publics,” rather than as extensions of nationally bounded media systems (Bruns, 2023). We therefore approach cross-border news circulation through the analysis of public spaces and their relational positioning, rather than through country-level audience aggregates. In our case, the Facebook spaces that re-share Russian domestic news URLs are often embedded in local contexts and recurring cross-border connections, such as shared language, long-run historical and cultural linkages, and geopolitical alignments. We therefore included ties to Russia as a classification dimension not to treat countries as nationally bounded spaces, but to capture recurring patterns in which types of public spaces are more likely to emerge, persist, and circulate Russia’s domestic news across borders. While the thematic orientation of public spaces captures issue organisation, the ties to Russia capture a durable context that structures these issue publics. The typology classifies these publics by their geopolitical positioning and long-run social–historical ties, and examines how these features relate to the sharing of war-critical versus war-uncritical Russian domestic news URLs.
Our analysis reveals three central patterns. Firstly, linguistic proximity functions as a dual conduit. On the one hand, it enables the circulation of war-uncritical news URLs in many Russophone Facebook spaces but, on the other hand, the very same linguistic channel also facilitates the spread of war-critical news URLs. Secondly, ideologically aligned and Russia-affiliated spaces act as insulated channels for Russia’s informational influence. They almost uniformly amplify war-uncritical news URLs, thereby functioning as stable conduits for Kremlin-friendly content. Thirdly, spaces in the languages of former European socialist states generated a distinct configuration. While spaces sharing predominantly war-uncritical news URLs outnumbered war-critical ones numerically, the latter counterbalanced this with slightly greater posting intensity. Nevertheless, the spaces circulated more war-uncritical news URLs proportionally than those linked to former Soviet states.
The article proceeds as follows. We first review research on transnational news consumption and authoritarian information influence on SNSs and introduce our research questions. We then present findings on the ties and thematic orientations of Facebook spaces amplifying Russia’s domestic news URLs, as well as their patterns of war-critical versus war-uncritical URL sharing. The article concludes by situating these findings in the literature and discussing limitations.
Transnational news and foreign authoritarian propaganda on social networking sites
SNSs have become a central source of traffic for news outlets worldwide (Newman et al., 2025). Their affordances of global reach, algorithmic recommendation, and platform-specific moderation enable news content to circulate well beyond national borders, and some outlets deliberately target international audiences (Königslöw and Wessler, 2024). Conceptually, we approach Facebook public spaces as issue-organised spaces in a fragmented network of publics, rather than as extensions of nationally bounded media systems (Bruns, 2023). This allows us to study cross-border news circulation by mapping how public communication spaces are organised and connected, instead of treating countries as fixed audience containers. In settings of networked authoritarianism, regimes adapt participatory platforms for control and projection rather than liberalisation, turning SNSs into arenas of information influence as well as infrastructures of distribution (Lokot, 2023; MacKinnon, 2011; Maréchal, 2017). Our study positions itself within this debate by tracing how Russia’s domestic news is amplified in foreign Facebook spaces during wartime.
Prior research has approached cross-border news dynamics from both media- and user-centric perspectives. For the UK, user-centric web analytics reveal that overseas readership can exceed domestic readership, though foreign audiences tend to be less engaged and their behaviour varies with cultural proximity (Thurman et al., 2021). This bridging of supply and demand perspectives underscores that digital media have expanded transnational flows while attention and loyalty remain conditioned by language and culture. Our study extends this strand by shifting the unit of analysis from individual users or outlets to the networked Facebook environments that enable the amplification of Russia’s domestic news.
Diaspora communities and cosmopolitan youth are recurrent drivers of such cross-border use of news content, with language and cultural proximity serving as durable conduits (Valgas et al., 2025; Vihalemm and Leppik, 2019; Widholm, 2019). In the Baltic states context, audience typologies among Russian speakers confirm routine consumption of Russian state-aligned television and online sources alongside local media, evidencing transnational ties expressed through everyday repertoires (Vihalemm and Juzefovičs, 2021). Our study builds on this literature by operationalising these ties on SNSs and showing how linguistic, historical, ideological, and institutional linkages are manifested in distinct types of foreign Facebook public spaces. Drawing on network-of-publics approaches, we treat such enduring linkages as contextual conditions that shape how issue publics form and which external news repertoires they normalise (Bruns, 2023). Accordingly, “ties to Russia” are used as an analytic proxy for durable social-historical embeddedness structuring cross-border news circulation on SNSs.
A complementary media-centric line tracks reach via web traffic and SNS accounts, consistently finding that foreign audiences concentrate in regions of linguistic and cultural proximity (Glazunova et al., 2023; Thurman et al., 2021). Under networked authoritarianism, such patterns are not incidental, as state-aligned actors strategically leverage platform infrastructures and governance regimes to sustain cross-border visibility and influence (Lokot, 2023; Maréchal, 2017). Our contribution is to move from aggregate reach to the structure of dissemination by developing a cross-national typology of foreign Facebook spaces that engage with Russia’s domestic news after the start of the full-scale invasion.
Informational influence on social networking sites
Research on how political actors use SNSs to shape perceptions abroad employs a range of concepts, including propaganda, disinformation, and information campaigning. In this study, we use the concept of information influence to refer to practices that shape cross-border communicative environments through the dissemination and amplification of information. Accordingly, we interpret influence at the level of information environments and structural opportunities for amplification, rather than as evidence of individual-level attitude change or persuasive effectiveness. This approach follows research on propaganda-on-demand (Litvinenko, 2023) and participatory propaganda (Asmolov, 2019), and applies these perspectives to the circulation of news content on Facebook.
SNSs have become central infrastructures of information influence. Comparative research documents how state and non-state actors deploy coordinated manipulation across platforms and regions, ranging from inauthentic account networks to disinformation production organisations (Bradshaw et al., 2021; Poliakoff and Toepfl, 2026). Such efforts often seek to exert both domestic control and foreign influence, thereby blurring the distinction between domestic censorship and engagement with a foreign audience. The affordances of SNSs, such as algorithmic recommendation, networked amplification, and content moderation condition the reach and persistence of such influence.
Relevant scholarship suggests that information influence has both supply- and demand-side dynamics. Litvinenko (2023) introduced the concept of propaganda on demand, emphasising how propagandists strategically tailor eclectic, and at times contradictory, narratives to appeal to different social milieus. In this context, Okholm et al. (2024) demonstrated how the narratives from Russia’s foreign news outlet Sputnik on Nord Stream 2 varied across German-, Polish-, and English-language audiences aligning with pre-existing structures of meaning. This research highlights that not only audiences with language ties to the authoritarian country may be targeted with tailored propaganda.
Complementing this perspective, Asmolov (2019) proposed the notion of participatory propaganda, which highlights how audiences themselves contribute to producing and disseminating propaganda. By engaging users in this process, propaganda not only amplifies its reach but also fosters a sense of ownership and identity, deepening polarisation within target populations. Together, these perspectives suggest that, while propagandists seek to segment and tailor their messaging, foreign audiences may themselves play an active role in amplifying authoritarian content.
These insights underscore that information influence unfolds within transnational, networked media ecosystems, but systematic evidence on how such influence materialises across different types of foreign social media spaces remains scarce. Our study addresses this gap by analysing the dissemination of Russia’s domestic news on Facebook and developing a cross-national typology of amplifier spaces situating their role within the broader literature on information influence.
Russia’s informational influence on social networking sites
Extant research on Russia’s informational influence on SNSs has documented a variety of strategies and actors, ranging from troll farms such as the Internet Research Agency (DiResta et al., 2022; Doroshenko and Lukito, 2021; Poliakoff and Toepfl, 2026), to foreign news broadcasters RT and Sputnik (Yablokov and Chatterje-Doody, 2021), to the audiences engaging with their content (Glazunova et al., 2023; Henriksen et al., 2024; Okholm et al., 2024; Wagnsson, 2023). Even prior to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia pursued foreign policy goals by targeting Russophone audiences abroad through language, religion, business, and media networks (Rotaru, 2018). Much of the existing research on this topic has focused on diaspora or minority communities in specific countries (e.g., Golova, 2020; Juzefovičs and Vihalemm, 2020; Vihalemm and Juzefovičs, 2021), often employing user-centric designs. To demonstrate how Russia has adapted the legacy of Soviet propaganda techniques to the digital age, Willaert and Tuters (2025) mapped the coordinated diplomatic networks on the Telegram platform that were established to reach domestic and international audiences.
By contrast, little systematic research has examined how Russia’s domestic news content travels transnationally on SNSs using a media-centric approach. One exception is Kling (2022), showing that, even before the full-scale invasion, Russian-language domestic news outlets were consumed both inside and outside Russia on Facebook. Yet, to our knowledge, no study has analysed how foreign Facebook audiences with differing ties to Russia engage with domestic Russian news since the full-scale invasion began. Our contribution is to fill this gap by providing the first cross-national typology of foreign Facebook spaces engaging with Russian domestic news during wartime.
In this study, we focus on public Facebook spaces as key intermediaries through which domestic Russian news reaches global audiences. Previous work has shown that such spaces structure exposure to political content. For example, González-Bailón et al. (2023) find pronounced ideological segregation in public spaces, while Del Vicario et al. (2016) demonstrate how thematically organised communities can function as loci of polarisation and narrative consolidation. We extend transnational news audience research by shifting the unit of analysis to public Facebook spaces as networked environments of dissemination, and by mapping how durable ties and thematic organisation structure the cross-border circulation of Russia’s domestic news URLs. Accordingly, we ask:
RQ1: What types of foreign Facebook public spaces amplified Russian domestic news URLs during the first six months of the full-scale invasion with regard to their ties to Russia and thematic orientations?
RQ2: How do these audience types differ in their sharing patterns of war-critical versus war-uncritical outlet URLs, and what do descriptive indicators of activity and audience size (engagement and subscriber count) reveal about these patterns?
Method
Data collection
We identified 72 Russian-language news outlet domains considered among the most influential (top) in Russia as of May 2022, where “influence” is defined through Kling (2022) (a) audience reach within Russia and (b) frequency of citation by other outlets and SNSs. For this purpose, we used metrics from LiveInternet.ru (audience traffic) and Medialogia (intermedia citations), as these platforms are widely used within the Russian media environment itself to measure outlet performance. Our selection thus follows the metrics through which influence is defined domestically, rather than introducing external benchmarks (see Supplementary File, for details on the selection procedure and Table 1, for full list of news outlet domains).
For each news outlet domain, aggregated data was collected via Meta’s CrowdTangle API, using the Python “Crowd” library. 1 No personal or private user data were accessed. All posts were retrieved from public Facebook spaces (pages, groups, verified profiles) that explicitly linked to these outlets’ websites during the period from 24 February to 24 August 2022. CrowdTangle provided data only from public Facebook entities that met minimum visibility thresholds. These are specifically pages with over 25,000 followers, groups with more than 95,000 members (or over 2,000 members for US-based groups), as well as all verified profiles. This means our dataset includes only larger and public spaces and does not reflect activity in smaller or private spaces. The thresholds ensure that the analysed content had sufficient scale to generate reliable metrics but also introduce a selection bias toward highly visible entities (see Angus et al., 2023, for methodological discussion). Posts in which URLs including a news outlet domain were embedded only within images (the mediaUrl field) were excluded because they cannot be tracked as link shares.
The initial dataset comprised 673,656 unique posts across 15,780 public spaces. To prepare the data, we separated all external links so that each URL contained in a post was treated as a distinct entry, rather than grouping multiple links within a single post.
Data cleaning and sampling
This study focused on public spaces that systematically “amplify” Russia’s domestic news URLs. We use the terms “amplification” descriptively to denote the re-sharing of outlet URLs by these spaces, without making claims about algorithmic boosting, exposure, or opinion change. This approach aligns with work showing that audience segments can operate as vehicles for further dissemination of authoritarian messaging across information environments (Wagnsson, 2023). To focus on systematic amplification rather than incidental sharing, we retained only spaces that posted URLs to Russia’s domestic outlets at least 10 times. This threshold was informed by an exploratory inspection of the dataset at different cut-off levels. Also, we excluded official Facebook pages of the news outlets themselves, as these function primarily as first-order distribution channels rather than independent amplifier spaces. We further excluded spaces targeting exclusively domestic Russian audiences or niche hobbyist spaces when Russian domestic news URLs were entirely unrelated to political or public affairs. This yielded the final amplifier dataset of 912 unique public spaces, including 70 of the 72 distinct outlet URLs. Detailed stepwise reductions and robustness checks are reported in the Supplementary File.
Data categorisation
Amplifier spaces were categorised based on their ties to Russia and their thematic focus. To achieve this, we applied a grounded theory approach (Lindlof and Taylor, 2019), which involved open coding of the Facebook spaces’ descriptions, names, and postings to identify recurring patterns. One of the authors of this article gradually refined codes through constant comparison until no new categories emerged, indicating theoretical saturation. This procedure resulted in a two dimensional six-fold typology, which is presented in the findings section. To assess reliability, a sample of 100 accounts was independently coded by the second author of this article for both coding dimensions (ties and thematic focus). Intercoder reliability, measured by Krippendorff’s α, was 0.88 for ties and 0.84 for thematic focus, both of which are generally considered strong levels of reliability. The public spaces that have not been coded during the typology building were coded by the author who initially developed the categories of the two dimensions.
To address potential overlaps between thematically proximate categories, coding decisions followed a rule-based approach centred on the primary organising principle of each space. Thematic categories were treated as mutually exclusive and assigned based on the dominant function and self-positioning of the space, as reflected in its name, description, and recurring posting practices, rather than on the mere presence of specific topics. Accordingly, spaces were classified based on whether they were primarily organised around Russia as an identity reference, political ideologies, parties or grassroots movements, everyday community-oriented communication, news aggregation or commentary, Ukraine-related issues, or military themes. In cases where multiple themes co-occurred, classification was based on the category that best captured the space’s central purpose and mode of engagement. For example, a community-oriented page that occasionally shared politically salient Russian news was coded as community-centred when such content appeared embedded in everyday community communication, whereas spaces primarily structured around ideological debate or political mobilisation were coded as political, even when community-related topics were present.
Critical stance toward the war
News outlets were categorised as critical or uncritical based on their editorial stance to Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. Drawing on the European Commission (2023) definition of Kremlin disinformation strategies, namely, “suppressing the truth about the war and amplifying lies about an alleged ‘special operation’” (p.8) – we manually categorised outlets’ content. Intercoder reliability was perfect (Krippendorff’s α = 1). Sixty outlets were classified as war-uncritical, and 12 as war-critical (see Supplementary File, Table 1). This created a categorical variable allowing us to compare how war-critical and war-uncritical outlets are differentially amplified across Facebook spaces.
As previous research has shown that most Facebook spaces share a mixture of war-critical and war-uncritical URLs (Kling and Poliakoff, 2025), we first computed, for each space, the share of posts containing war-critical outlet URLs among all posts linking to Russian domestic news outlets (0–100%). This continuous measure captures the degree to which a space predominantly amplifies war-critical versus war-uncritical sources. For descriptive and comparative purposes, Facebook spaces were subsequently summarised using a four-category scheme based on this share. Spaces posting only war-uncritical URLs were classified as uncritical, and those posting only war-critical links as critical. Spaces in which more than 50 percent of the posted URLs were war-uncritical or war-critical were classified as majority uncritical and majority critical, respectively. We use the 50 percent threshold as a transparent majority rule to indicate which type of outlet URLs predominates within a given space. Because any threshold-based categorisation may affect borderline cases, we assess robustness to alternative cut-points and report the full distributions of the continuous measure in the Supplementary File (Figures 3 and 4), demonstrating that the main patterns do not hinge on this specific threshold.
Data analysis
While data were initially gathered at the post level, all subsequent categorisations and analysis were conducted at the space level, treating each amplifier space as a distinct entity. We adopted a mixed-methods approach to capture amplification dynamics. For each amplifier space, we calculated the total number of posts containing the URL to Russian news outlets (based on unique accountUrl). This measure allowed us to identify the most active amplifiers and compare amplification intensity across categories of ties, thematic focus, and outlet type (war-critical vs. war-uncritical). The combination of quantitative assessment and qualitative categorisation allows us to capture both the scale and the character of Russian domestic news URL amplification across Facebook public spaces.
Findings
Ties and thematic orientation of Facebook’s amplifier spaces
To answer RQ1, we outline (1) the ties with Russia, and (2) thematic foci that emerged during the analysis of the 912 Facebook spaces that shared Russia’s domestic news URLs between 24 February and 24 August 2022. Counts (n) refer to unique spaces. Post and subscriber totals are aggregated across the same units. Proportions in parentheses show the distribution across the four categories of Facebook spaces with regards to the type of news URLs shared (C – Critical / MC – Majority‑Critical / MU –Majority‑Uncritical / U – Uncritical). Figure 1 cross‑tabulates the Facebook audience ties to Russia with their thematic focus.
Matrix of ties and thematic focus.
Audience ties to Russia
Thematic focus
The second axis of categorisation describes the dominant thematic orientation of each space based on the Facebook spaces’ descriptions, names, and postings.
Figure 1 shows that language-tied spaces account for almost half of the total number of amplifier spaces (423 of 912, or 46%) and are present in every thematic niche. Compatriot spaces, represented by the intersection of language ties and community-centred focus, form the largest intersection of ties and thematic orientation (n = 156). They are followed by Russophone spaces focused on Russia without affiliation to any foreign country (n = 108) and Russophone News & Blogs spaces (n = 82). While the existence of a large number of diplomatically-tied spaces officially connected to Russia is unsurprising (n = 68), an equal number of spaces fall within the intersection of historical ties and political spaces (n = 68), representing local political movements in former European socialist countries (rather than in former Soviet countries). A further notable finding is that Russia-focused spaces are more numerous in former European socialist countries (n = 35) than in former Soviet countries (n = 6). Within the ideological ties group, the largest theme is likewise Russia-focused (n = 33).
Patterns of war-critical vs. war-uncritical news URL amplification
To answer RQ2, we compare war-critical and war-uncritical news URL distribution to reveal clear structural differences. Figure 2, as well as Figures 1 and 2 in the Supplementary File visualise the main quantitative patterns discussed below.
Amplification patterns by ties to Russia.
First, linguistic proximity functions as a dual conduit of information influence. While language-tied war-uncritical news URL dissemination is numerically dominant, its war-critical counterparts exhibit slightly higher posting density (104 vs. 69 posts on average) and marginally greater cumulative reach (29,923 vs. 22,088 followers), highlighting an endogenous corrective within the Russophone sphere against war-uncritical news URL sharing.
Second, ideologically and Russia-tied spaces function as relatively insulated conduits of information influence, as 97 percent of the ideology-tied pages and all Russia-tied pages disseminate war-uncritical news URLs, together producing more than 10,000 war-uncritical news URL posts and reaching at least 1.2 million aggregated, non-unique users. These spaces encompassed a heterogeneous mix of ideological orientations, including far-left anti-imperialist communities, nationalist far-right groups, and explicitly pro-Russian initiatives that advanced forms of digital Putinism and conservative values aligned with Kremlin narratives. This combination illustrates how disparate ideological milieus can converge in amplifying war-uncritical Russian domestic news URLs, potentially contributing to the resilience of authoritarian messaging at the level of cross-space circulation, across otherwise opposed political camps.
Third, historically-tied spaces show a distinct pattern. War-uncritical news URL sharing outnumbers war-critical sharing, yet the latter compensate through slightly higher posting volume. Overall, historically-tied spaces (former European socialist countries) amplify a larger proportion of war-uncritical news URLs than culturally-tied spaces (former Soviet countries). These spaces often invoke historical nodal points, ranging from nostalgia for the Soviet past and Leninist traditions to far-right reinterpretations of national histories, using them as symbolic resources to legitimise alignment with contemporary Russian narratives. In Bulgaria, for example, pro-Russian groups draw on memories of socialist fraternity. In Poland and Romania, by contrast, far-right communities selectively reframe anti-communist legacies in ways that nonetheless converge with pro-Russian positions, illustrating how divergent historical experiences can be mobilised to sustain war-uncritical news URL amplification.
Aggregated across all ties, war-uncritical news URL dissemination predominates in volume (≈ 37,931 vs. 26,343 posts) but not in aggregated audience reach (≈ 10.67 million vs. 10.6 million followers). Similar separations by the level of criticism (see Figures 1 and 2 in the supplementary file) show that Ukraine-focused spaces share the lowest proportion of war-uncritical news URLs.
Discussion
This study builds on extant research on transnational news consumption (Kling, 2022; Rauchfleisch et al., 2020; Thurman et al., 2021), a phenomenon that on SNSs cannot be explained by diasporic identity alone. By analysing Facebook spaces as issue-organised publics embedded in a wider network of publics (Bruns, 2023), we identify historical experiences, ideological affinities, and diplomatic infrastructures as additional structural linkages that channel the transnational circulation of Russian domestic news. This extends transnational audience research by moving beyond language-based explanations and by specifying the infrastructural conditions under which foreign publics engage with authoritarian news sources on SNSs. Taken together, our findings indicate that platform governance must look beyond surface-level linguistic affinity and address ideologically entrenched or institutionally backed amplification nodes if the aim is to curb the transnational spread of authoritarian information influence (Lokot, 2023; MacKinnon, 2011; Maréchal, 2017)
Structural conduits: Ties to Russia
Our findings show that linguistic, historical, ideological, and diplomatic ties structure how Russian domestic news circulates abroad. These ties function as durable contextual resources that pattern the emergence and connectivity of issue publics across borders (Bruns, 2023). While prior research on transnational news audiences has largely emphasised cultural and linguistic proximity as the primary conduits of foreign news circulation (e.g. Golova, 2020; Valgas et al., 2025; Widholm, 2019), our results demonstrate that additional pathways matter. Historical linkages in former European socialist countries, ideological affinities across both far-left and far-right groups, and state-linked diplomatic infrastructures such as embassy-affiliated Facebook accounts all sustained the amplification of war-uncritical Russian domestic news URLs. This extends earlier work on Russia’s diplomatic communication networks on SNSs (Willaert and Tuters, 2025) by showing how such ties operate within broader transnational Facebook environments.
Conceptually, these patterns are consistent with both propaganda-on-demand (targeted seeding: Litvinenko, 2023) and participatory propaganda (audience-led uptake: Asmolov, 2019). Due to our methodological design, we cannot adjudicate between these mechanisms with post-level URL data. Thus, instead, we treat ties as durable conditions that shape where Russian domestic news URLs are likely to be taken up, recontextualised, and circulated across borders. This shifts analytical attention from narrative content alone to the infrastructural patterns through which authoritarian media circulate transnationally on SNSs.
Issue publics: Thematic orientations
Within these structural ties, amplification was further differentiated by the thematic orientation of Facebook spaces. News-focused and political spaces provided dense networks of Russia’s information influence circulation, community-centred spaces show how Russia’s domestic news enter non-political contexts, and military-centred groups illustrate the appeal of such content to niche interests. Leadership-oriented spaces, both pro- and anti-Putin, highlight how personalised rule becomes a central axis of polarisation. This suggests that Putin’s personalised leadership not only shapes the supply of narratives but also structures demand-side engagement, turning him into a symbolic focal point through which both support and resistance to authoritarian influence are articulated. These findings resonate with Asmolov’s (2019) concept of participatory propaganda, as audiences did not merely consume or passively share content but actively integrated Russian domestic news URLs into their thematic framings. The embedding of Russian domestic news into diverse foreign Facebook spaces underscores that information influence on SNSs is a dynamic and transnational process of reinterpretation and adaptation across heterogeneous spaces.
Distributional asymmetries and implications
Another contribution of our study lies in showing how structural ties shape asymmetries in the amplification of war-critical versus war-uncritical news URLs. War-uncritical news URL sharing dominated in language-based spaces, spaces with historical ties, and ideologically aligned spaces. War-critical news URL amplification was concentrated in Ukrainian and pro-Ukrainian spaces, where Russia’s domestic news URLs were often shared to expose disinformation or monitor Russian state-controlled narratives. Political and news-focused spaces displayed mixed patterns, blending war-critical and war-uncritical news URLs. This asymmetry suggests that authoritarian propaganda enjoys a broader set of structural conduits abroad than its critics, underscoring concerns about the resilience of authoritarian informational influence in transnational information environments (Asmolov, 2019; Litvinenko, 2023; Lokot, 2023; Willaert and Tuters, 2025).
The temporal context of our data, immediately after Russia’s full-scale invasion and the introduction of several measures to curb Russia’s informational influence in Europe (Kling and Poliakoff, 2025), likely shaped both supply- and demand-side dynamics in ways that pre-invasion studies could not capture. Kremlin-aligned news messaging intensified and diversified across linguistically and historically proximate spaces, while audiences simultaneously gravitated toward war-critical or war-uncritical news under the shock of war. In combination, this immediate post-invasion context likely amplified both targeted seeding and participatory uptake of Russian domestic news, intensifying existing transnational conduits of amplification (Asmolov, 2019; Litvinenko, 2023).
Regional variation among European post-socialist countries further nuances this picture. In states with distant historical affinities to Russia and lower perceived near-term invasion risk (e.g., former European socialist countries) war-uncritical news URL amplification was more resilient, even as war-critical news URL sharing persisted. By contrast, in frontline or high-threat environments (Ukraine-focused spaces, the Baltic states), Russian domestic war-uncritical content circulated predominantly as material for critique, fact-checking, and situational awareness. Substantively, this indicates that post-invasion information environments are structured not by a single axis of proximity but by layered combinations of history, language, and perceived security. Where distance from the battlefield reduces immediate threat salience, legacy affinities more readily translate into war-uncritical uptake. Where threat is proximate, the same channels are repurposed to contest Kremlin-aligned content.
A further implication concerns how interview- and survey-based studies conceptualise “Russian-speaking” audiences. Much of the research literature and journalistic reporting collapses heterogeneous publics, such as citizens of Russia, Russophone minorities in post-Soviet states, and Russophone communities in former socialist countries, into a single analytical category. This blurs the distinction between their different predispositions and media environments. Our typology shows that what is often treated as a unified “Russian world” is in practice a mosaic of small minorities dispersed across polities and thematic niches. It becomes a numerical “majority” only when aggregated across countries and, analytically, merged with users in Russia itself. This matters empirically and normatively. Within Ukrainian Facebook spaces, for instance, Russian-language news sharing was overwhelmingly war-critical. Had we re-classified such spaces solely by language rather than by topical community (Ukraine-focused), the “Russophone” label would have been misleading. We therefore encourage future interview- and survey-based research designs to differentiate (at minimum) citizens and residents of Russia, Russophone minorities in former Soviet states, and Russophones of other countries, and to incorporate measures of ideological alignment rather than relying on language or ethnicity alone. For policymakers, this also means looking beyond diasporas, as political movements in former Soviet and former socialist contexts may be structurally predisposed to amplify Kremlin-aligned messaging and warrant the kind of organisational tracing (financial, logistical, personnel ties) exemplified in Shekhovtsov’s (2017) work.
Finally, the developing translation technology continues to reshape transnational exposure of domestic news content. The rapid growth of low-cost machine translation and conversational AI has progressively lowered linguistic barriers since early 2022, enabling users interested in Russian-language news to access, paraphrase, and circulate that content despite formal platform bans or geo-blocking (as we show in our companion analysis (Kling and Poliakoff, 2025)). This technological accessibility is reinforced by shifting societal norms, such as the political rhetoric toward Russia. Such dynamics may contribute to an increase in apparent cultural relevance and social acceptability of Kremlin-aligned sources within these spaces, as reflected in patterns of URL re-sharing. Together, these developments suggest that attempts to curb information influence through deplatforming alone will face diminishing returns when language and cultural barriers erode simultaneously. Durable mitigation, therefore, requires strategies that target the demand side (literacies, audience predispositions) alongside supply-side constraints. These patterns do not allow us to determine whether propagandists strategically targeted specific communities or whether predisposed audiences sought out Russian content, as both mechanisms are plausible and likely co-present. They do indicate, however, that audience structures and geopolitical shocks interact, as proximity in language or history may open a door, but contemporary threat assessments and domestic political alignments determine who walks through it and with what content it is amplified.
Limitations and future research
Several limitations with regards to the data collection and analysis need to be acknowledged. First, data retrieved through Meta’s CrowdTangle API cover only large public pages, large public groups, U.S.-based public groups meeting a threshold, and verified profiles. Smaller, private, or semi-private spaces therefore remain outside the scope of this study, even though they may also contribute to the circulation of Russian domestic news. Second, our threshold of 10 posts as a cut-off for inclusion may have excluded some relevant but lower-activity amplifiers. In addition, the analysis is limited to Facebook and to the first 6 months following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which constrains the temporal and platform scope of the findings.
A further limitation concerns the operationalisation of war-critical versus war-uncritical amplification. Russia’s news outlets were coded binarily, and Facebook spaces were subsequently graduated into four categories (critical, majority-critical, majority-uncritical, uncritical) based on the relative share of URLs posted. While this typology offers a transparent and analytically useful way to summarise dominant amplification patterns across a large number of spaces, it necessarily abstracts from within-space variation. In particular, spaces whose distributions of war-critical URLs cluster near the majority threshold may shift categories following relatively small changes in their underlying posting mix. Accordingly, the four-category graduation should be understood as a heuristic operationalisation rather than a definitive classification of Facebook spaces. To address this limitation, we complement the categorical graduation with continuous measures of the share of war-critical URLs and report full distributions as well as sensitivity checks for alternative cut-points in the supplementary file. These additional analyses demonstrate that the main comparative patterns discussed in the manuscript do not hinge on a single threshold choice. Nonetheless, alternative operationalisations of amplification and criticism may yield additional insights and should be explored in future research.
Future work should also extend the analytical framework developed here to other platforms, such as Telegram and TikTok, where Russia’s domestic news also circulates and where different platform affordances may shape amplification dynamics in distinct ways. Longitudinal designs would further allow researchers to trace how patterns of war-critical and war-uncritical amplification evolve beyond the immediate post-invasion period examined in this study. Moreover, while the present article focuses on mapping structural patterns of transnational amplification, future research could build on the continuous measures introduced here to formally model the relative weight of different ties, thematic orientations, and contextual factors in shaping amplification outcomes. Such modelling approaches fall outside the scope of the present study.
Finally, comparative research across different authoritarian regimes would help assess whether similar audience structures and amplification dynamics characterise the transnational circulation of state-aligned news beyond the Russian case. Extending this line of inquiry could further contribute to research on transnational news consumption on social media platforms and support efforts to build democratic resilience against authoritarian information influence.
Footnotes
Ethical considerations
Not applicable.
Consent to participate statements
Not applicable.
Funding
This work was supported by the Swedish Armed Forces’ research program. During the data collection, it has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (Grant Agreement No. 819025), as it was part of the ERC consolidator project on ‘The Consequences of the Internet for Russia’s Informational Influence Abroad’ (
).
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and publication of this article.