DIGITAL FLOWS OF THE RUSSIAN RADICAL OPPOSITION: DISCOURSES, DYNAMICS, SOCIAL BASE (2021)
The article shows the results of an automated social media analysis of online streams of the Russian radical opposition in social media. The hypothesis is being tested empirically that in the context of the non-recognition of the results of the Russian elections in 2021 by politicians in a number of Western countries, the radical opposition of the Runet purposefully stimulated a mass protest in the digital environment in the post-electoral period. It is assumed that the key triggers of mobilization were contexts that resonate with the socially deprived part of the population of Russia and discourses that are most sentimental for the young part of Russian society. To implement the accumulation of social media massive, the service for monitoring social media IQBuzz was used, the number of unloading posts was 100,000, the depth of analysis - September 2021. Search query dictionaries were compiled for four types of information flows of the radical opposition: the flow of protest mobilization, the human rights flow, the flow about “media freedom” and the flow against restrictive measures during a pandemic. It has been established that in the dominant stream, aimed at mobilizing protest, discourses prevail, undermining confidence in the current government and aimed at shaping the conviction of Internet users in “falsifying the voting results”. Empirical evidence of the opposition's active use of youth as a social base and support audience of a number of radical information flows is shown.