Agenda construction in local online communities: differences in the discursive framing of events

Abstract

The article examines the mechanisms of regional agenda construction in local online communities, using Telegram channels of Krasnodar Region as a case study. The focus of the study is on differences in the discursive framing of socially significant events in official and unofficial media resources. The empirical basis consists of publications from six popular Telegram channels over the period from November 2025 to January 2026. The study employs a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods of digital text analysis, including TF-IDF vectorization, cosine similarity measurement, lexical and stylistic analysis, and topic modeling (BERTopic). The findings show that the regional digital agenda is organized around a shared thematic core, including security, transport restrictions, emergencies, everyday urban issues, and activities of public authorities. At the same time, official channels tend to frame events through institutional and neutral narratives, whereas unofficial communities more often employ conflict-oriented, and everyday interpretive frames. The article concludes that the regional digital public sphere is polycentric and characterized by competition between distinct discursive regimes under conditions of digitalized communication.