Online Platform as a Discourse Factor of Virtual Communities

Due to the proliferation of different online platforms, the study of more than one platform at a time has become a notable trend in communication research. Cross-platform studies offer an opportunity to identify multiple factors in constructing online discourse. This paper examines the discourse of almost 100 Russian virtual communities on two different platforms - Vk.com and Telegram. Using Latent Dirichlet allocation, we identify the specificity of discourse on dissimilar online platforms under agenda unification and show differences in discourse between “public-facing” and “private-facing” platforms.