Experimental Study of the Conflict-inducing Nature of Telegram Posts about Labor Migration: The Psycholinguistic Aspect of Perception

This paper presents the findings of an empirical investigation into the conflictogenicity of multimodal media texts. The study has a dual objective: first, to conduct a psycholinguistic analysis of how Telegram posts are perceived by youth within the context of debates on labor migration; second, to develop a typology of semiotic indicators that provoke conflict. The primary method employed is a survey involving 102 students from various faculties at a single university. The results suggest that conflict-provoking meaning is primarily mediated through verbal indicators, which frame the interpretation of relatively neutral visual and auditory semiotic resources. The authors systematically categorize linguistic and semiotic conflict-provoking indicators in multimodal texts directed at a mass audience on Russian Telegram. Findings indicate that linguistic conflict indicators are predominantly expressed through lexicosemantic and grammatical units that polarize “us” versus “them”. It is also demonstrated that linguistic resources alone are sufficient to convey conflictual meanings. The study concludes that the cognitive mechanism underlying conflictogenicity in multimodal posts is a semantic disparity among verbal, visual, and auditory cues. The proposed typology of conflict indicators offers a useful framework for further research into the construction of conflict meaning and the development of critical skills for analyzing multimodal digital content.

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