The Religious Factor in Radicalized Digital Media Discourse: Prospects for Applying the Conceptual Framework of Distinction

The religious factor in digital media discourse functions not only as a source of shared meanings and identity, but also as a resource for conflict mobilization, shifting contested interpretations into a register of moral self-evidence and political “obligatoriness.” The study’s theoretical framework is grounded in George Spencer-Brown’s concept of “distinction,” in which meaning-making is understood as drawing a boundary between the marked and the unmarked; this makes it possible to treat oppositions such as “orthodoxy/falsehood,” “norm/deviation,” and “loyalty/betrayal” as operational effects of discursive practices. The article analyzes how lines of tension are constructed in the regional digital media discourse of the Republic of Dagestan and assesses the heuristic potential of the distinction model. The empirical basis is a targeted corpus of 1,464 news hooks (January–August 2025) collected from key nodes of the digital media discourse (institutional muftiate resources, Sufi opposition, radical de-institutionalized channels, and secular aggregators). The material is coded using a matrix of variables (actor, target of attack, type of distinction: theological/moral/political, delegitimation strategies, and event triggers) and analyzed in three steps: reconstructing “primary distinctions,” identifying mechanisms of legitimation through sacred authority, and comparing cases to detect patterns of radicalization (a shift from criticizing actions to denying subjectivity and religious belonging). The findings show that a key conflict resource is competition over the right to define the basic boundary of religious legitimacy (the muftiate vs. opposition Sufis) and its expansion into moral-legal and political labeling; in the “Sufis/Salafis” confrontation, doctrinal distinctions are systematically coupled with political ones, accelerating the transfer of the “mark” from practices to leaders, groups, chains of tradition, and even institutions. The methodological implication is that the distinction optic allows radicalization to be described not as a sum of “radical opinions,” but as a process of producing and stabilizing boundaries; it also yields operationalizable indicators (markers of exclusion, accusatory constructions, appeals to the sacred, and prohibition rhetoric) suitable for comparing actors and tracing how digital infrastructure turns audiences into “communities of boundary maintenance.”