Managing the Digital Socio-Political Agenda Online: Subjects, Technologies, and Results

Abstract

The aim of the study is to identify and characterize the actors, factors, technologies and results of managing the online social and political agenda and to propose models of its management to public authorities. The model of online agenda, developed by the authors, was tested on the empirical data of the ‘Constitution’ case. The empirical basis for the study of the digital agenda (March–September 2020) was 1,150 million messages on Twitter and Facebook, the news content (5,000 publications) of the major national agencies Interfax, RIA Novosti and TASS, and the accounts of 460,000 users.
 To identify technological methods of building and managing the socio-political agenda on the Internet and assess their effectiveness, the authors used methods of network, visual and linguistic analysis (content analysis, semantic analysis of hashtags in the obtained arrays of empirical data).
 As a result, conclusions were made on three strategies to manage the online agenda: the stra­tegy of engagement (expanding the range of issues covered and equal emphasis on a variety of topics to involve more participants in the discourse); the strategy of pragmatic modelling (narrowing the range of issues covered with uneven emphasis on topics, i.e. maintaining a focus only on certain concepts of issues covered); strategy of discursive substitution (complete transformation of the digital socio-political and political ‘Constitution’ agenda and its replacement with other connected topics).
 The study revealed the intersections and divergences between the discourse shaped by civil society and the official media, and, as a result, revealed the content and vectors that shape the online socio-political agenda. Obviously, the existence of divergent vectors in the digital socio-political agenda, especially in crisis and emergency situations, prevents social and political system stabilization and civil society mobilization for constructive social practices.