Coverage of the 2019 Moscow City Duma Election in Social Media

Section: New Media

The coverage of the 2019 Moscow City Duma election in social media was reduced primarily to a chronicle of protests against the refusal to register opposition candidates and to radical pro-government and opposition propaganda. Such are the results of a two-month content analysis of the most popular political blogs and communities on eight most popular social networks in Russia (VKontakte, Facebook, Twitter, Odnoklassniki, YouTube, Telegram, LiveJournal and Instagram). It turned out that the specificity of the social network affects the form of the post in a limited way. Multimedia was relatively often used on all social networks except YouTube, but most of the posts were still monomedial (text, text and picture, picture, video). It is noteworthy that among the parliamentary candidates the unregistered candidates were mentioned in publications more often than the registered ones; the second place, in terms of frequency of mention, was occupied not by other political actors (president, mayor, CEC and the like), but by the people detained at protest rallies. It is also notable that in social media publications there was practically no mention of local city problems, which in theory should have become the main agenda of the Moscow parliament election.

DOI: 10.30547/vestnik.journ.4.2020.327

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