This blogpost summarizes a recent project proposal I developed.

The Orthosphere

Over the past decade, a decentralized online network has emerged at the intersection of Orthodox Christianity, gender politics, and far-right ideology. Sometimes called the "orthosphere," this ecosystem spans blogs, YouTube channels, social media accounts, and comment sections in multiple languages — English, Russian, Bulgarian, Greek, and Serbian.

What makes this space worth studying is not just its content, but its discursive function. The orthosphere doesn't simply express political opinions in religious language; it actively works to reframe far-right positions — ethno-nationalism, anti-democratic rhetoric, gender traditionalism — as theological necessities. This process, which political theorists call metapolitics, operates beneath the level of explicit political argument. It shifts the cultural assumptions within which political arguments take place.

My research maps this process empirically.

Theoretical Framework

The project draws on several intersecting frameworks. From political sociology, it builds on the concept of metapolitics (Schilk, 2025): the gradual reframing of cultural common sense that makes exclusionary and authoritarian policies appear socially acceptable. From discourse analysis (Keller, 2024), it takes the idea that narratives don't just describe reality — they construct it, and repeated associations between concepts create chains of normalization over time.

A key concept is Riccardi-Swartz's (2023) notion of techno-theologoumena: online theological interpretations on topics where official church institutions have no clear position — gender roles, church-nation relationships, evolution, and modernity itself. These are the discursive spaces where metapolitical work happens most effectively, because there is no authoritative voice to push back.

Methodology

The research combines computational and qualitative methods across four stages:

1. Data Collection. Web scraping of publicly available Orthodox Christian online content from 2010 to 2025, covering English, Bulgarian, Russian, Greek, and Serbian sources. The corpus includes blog posts, comments, social media content, and YouTube videos and podcasts. Snowball sampling from known orthosphere entry points ensures broad coverage of the ecosystem.

2. Narration Coding. A "Gold Standard" sample of documents was semi-manually coded for metapolitical narrations: framings, arguments, and rhetorical strategies associated with far-right discourse (e.g., white genocide narratives, antisemitic tropes, anti-democratic rhetoric, gender traditionalism framed as theology). An LLM-based classifier was then trained on this sample and applied to the remaining dataset, enabling classification at a scale impossible through manual coding alone.

3. Vector Embedding & Semantic Mapping. Each document is embedded using SBERT, creating a high-dimensional semantic space where documents with similar framings cluster together. This makes it possible to identify narrative communities — networks of texts sharing common narrations — without pre-defining categories.

4. Graph Analysis. Two parallel graph models are constructed: one with users as nodes and one with webspaces as nodes. A radicalism score (Rᵢ ∈ 0,1) is calculated for each node based on the prevalence of far-right narrations in its content. The network is then analyzed for:

• Whether radicalism increases over time within connected clusters
• Whether radical content transfers between linked nodes
• Which narrations show the highest betweenness centrality — acting as bridges between mainstream and fringe spaces
• The topology of mainstream-to-far-right discursive chains

The Orthosphere Dashboard

The research has produced a working proof-of-concept: Orthosphere, an interactive dashboard available at orthosphere.ai-tonchev.com. The dashboard allows users to explore the content network, browse narrative communities, and trace the pathways through which specific framings travel across the ecosystem.

For a technical overview of how the dashboard was built, see the Orthosphere dev blog post. The source code is available on GitHub.

References

• Keller, R. (2024). The Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse.
• Riccardi-Swartz, S. (2023). "Techno-theologoumena." Journal of Orthodox Christian Studies.
• Schilk, F. (2025). "Metapolitics of Crises." International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society.
• Tonchev, A. (2025). The Orthosphere Dashboard. orthosphere.ai-tonchev.com