“Communicative parasitism” in the Russian segment of telegram channels

Thearticle examines manifestationsof “communicativeparasitism” asa variant of communicativealignment in Russian-language Telegram channels. It examines howthe adjustment to other people’s communication products begins to serve fundamentally different interests and values. The peculiarities of new media and conditions of technologically mediated communication such as interactivity, recombinativeness, multimodality, etc., as well as the specificity of high conflict nature of social-and-political discourse, which plays a significant role in the processes of using power and struggling for it, are taken into account. “Communicative parasitism” is analyzed within both the description of Telegram channel and the subscribers’ posts and comments. It was found out that when “communicative parasitism” is used by a Telegram channel to build its own brand and promote itself at someone else’s expense, parasitic manifestations are usually limited to elements of design. However, there are often more complex cases in the ideological confrontation of social groups, where this phenomenon is exploited to consolidate one’s own group, represent it in a positive way and distance it from the opposing group, which is being discredited. Thus, “communicative parasitism” becomes an integral part of defense-attack strategies realized by a whole group of users for a long time. In this situation, a large number of customers are involved in a kind of language game with intertwining and interacting borrowings, contributing to the formation of group identity.