The “Election Atlas” project has launched a weekly social-media monitoring programme for the State Duma election period. We will track how active election participants are in the online space.
Social-media monitoring results are published weekly.
For the week of 7–13 July, 144,701 posts were studied. This week the parties submitted documents to the Central Election Commission of Russia following their pre-election congresses, as part of the next stage of the candidate registration procedure.
Main findings
The decline in the number of posts mentioning political parties continues: in the second week of the campaign there were 231,000, in the third week 162,000, and in the fourth week only 145,000. As a result, the figures were the lowest since the start of the campaign. Since a significant share of such mentions is generated by the parties’ own public pages or by news communities controlled by the authorities, this is clearly a centralised and deliberate policy. This is all the more so because it correlates with what is happening on television, where attention to the elections is also being deliberately reduced.
This decline in posting activity is at odds with the growing desire of social-media users to discuss events taking place in the country: despite the drop in the number of posts, engagement is simultaneously rising — people are reacting more actively to politicians’ statements and party initiatives. This is happening through discussion of the most resonant topics (education, fuel, wages).
The leaders in engagement and views were the CPRF and the LDPR. In mid-July their figures are approaching the peak values of the second week. This is happening because of the appearance of resonant materials (for example, initiatives on petrol benefits, etc.).
Number of mentions
Compared with the first week (a total of 175,700 party mentions), the fourth week shows a 17.6% decline in this indicator. Thus, after the peak of the second week, activity has fallen below the starting level. Mid-summer and the absence of striking actions by the parties, which are busy with the procedural issues of registering their lists, have meant that the earlier surge of interest in the election topic on the internet has not turned into sustained growth.
United Russia, the CPRF, the LDPR, New People and Yabloko are showing moderate growth, which indicates that their presence is stabilising.
A Just Russia showed an unexpected result last week due to the sharpest negative trend: after a peak in the second and third weeks, the number of posts fell to 48,000 (–43%). At the same time, engagement grew thanks to “sharp” statements by party leader Sergei Mironov — his initiatives are being actively discussed under the main posts in the party’s main public page on VKontakte.
Among the “small parties” the fluctuations are more noticeable, but they are linked to the fact that their figures are low in principle and even a slight change in percentage terms looks large. For example, the Direct Democracy Party’s figure rose from nine mentions to 76, but for the party this meant an increase of more than eightfold.
At the same time, the other small parties are showing significant growth. It is mainly linked to the fact that, after holding their congresses, the political parties have begun submitting documents to the Central Election Commission, and there have been many listing-type mentions of the parties that have submitted documents.
Against this background, however, the most striking growth is that of the Direct Democracy Party — it is linked not only to the submission of documents to the CEC, but also to the news that the commission had identified shortcomings in the documents that need to be rectified.
Trends in the distribution of publications by platform
In the fourth week the trend of declining party mentions on VKontakte — the main platform for posting information about the parties — continues. The growth in Telegram’s share of the overall information flow is linked to a change in the parsing method. As a result, Telegram is becoming the second most important platform for political content, overtaking MAX. We hope it now reflects more accurately the platform’s real contribution to public political discussion in Russia.
The decline in figures is directly linked to the fact that A Just Russia halved its mass posting on the social network compared with previous weeks. As a result, VKontakte’s share fell to its lowest values since the start of the campaign, but it remains the main platform.
MAX also lost ground in absolute numbers of posts mentioning political parties, while YouTube is broadly maintaining its previous level. It is worth noting, however, that the top views of publications on this social network belong to the LDPR: the most-viewed video is Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s speech about Sergei Furgal. The party is actively exploiting the image of the dead leader and of the “people’s governor” — a political prisoner who has now been in prison for several years.
Views
United Russia and New People are keeping their figures roughly stable, although some growth should be noted for United Russia and an approach towards the first-week figures. At the same time, they are not even trying to reach the peak of the second week (recall that it was linked to the party congress and the president’s presence at it).
The CPRF and the LDPR almost doubled their views, which correlates with the growth in posts and engagement. Meanwhile, A Just Russia lost 13% of views compared with last week.
The small parties significantly strengthened their presence, but the growth is linked to quite organic events: after holding their congresses, the parties began submitting documents to the Central Election Commission and many public pages mentioned them in a string, in the same listing-type posts.
At the same time, it is worth noting those whose growth looks outstanding: the Communists of Russia are showing a sevenfold increase in views with a sixfold drop in the number of posts. This is explained by a viral post about petrol benefits on Telegram. The Direct Democracy Party showed an 11-fold increase in views, and this is precisely linked to mass mentions in the news about the submission of documents to the CEC.
The most-viewed post by United Russia is linked to the fuel topic. Its author, Lipetsk deputy Sergei Popov, reports that the fuel situation is under control and that United Russia volunteers are working at filling stations: helping to organise the queue, handing out water, answering questions. The publication has many views and reposts, but the commenting option is disabled.
Nor did last week’s leader in the number of initiatives, Sergei Mironov, stand aside; this week he proposed a plan for exiting the fuel crisis.
The Communists of Russia did not stand aside from the fuel topic either and also came out with an initiative to create “petrol benefits”. This message was replicated by many public pages, including automotive ones.
Explosive user interest was generated by the discussion surrounding the speech by party leader Gennady Zyuganov in the State Duma and the reaction to it from Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin. The CPRF leader’s speech at the State Duma plenary session took place on 7 July. He outlined systemic economic problems and called for coordination of financial policy. In turn, deputies Vyacheslav Nikonov and Vyacheslav Volodin accused the opposition leader of “alarmism”.
Engagement
Almost all parties showed an increase in engagement compared with the third week. The audience began to react more actively to content, despite the fact that the total number of posts fell. This may be an effect of the larger number of posts on Telegram that we managed to detect last week.
The CPRF and the LDPR are the growth leaders among the large parties. A Just Russia is demonstrating a unique case: with a 43% drop in posts and a 13% drop in views, engagement grew by 16.7%.
For example, one of Sergei Mironov’s statements regarding higher education as a privilege received a new lease of life in the party public page from last week. Also, the initiative prohibiting an employer from depriving a worker of a large part of their salary sounded particularly acute (this concerns those whose base pay is at the minimum wage level and a substantial part of the salary is structured as a bonus, which often invites speculation on the employer’s part). It is noteworthy that more than half of the posts that made the top 10 by engagement were placed in the official VKontakte group of the party “A Just Russia — News Armizonskoye”.
The small parties, as with the number of posts, are showing a multiple increase in engagement in the fourth week; however, it cannot be said that this is the parties’ own achievement — such organic growth is linked, as in the first week, to the large abundance of posts listing the parties.
The CPRF and New People are cross-citing each other with another resonant event. The earlier discussion between deputies Ksenia Goryacheva and Nina Ostanina has entered a new phase. The CPRF is calling for a criminal case to be opened against the New People deputy for criticising the communists’ position on the topic of domestic violence.
Methodology
Four platforms used by Russians today were selected for the social-media monitoring: VKontakte, MAX, Telegram, YouTube. Unfortunately, we have not yet managed to set up effective monitoring of Odnoklassniki and Instagram, which could significantly affect the overall data. If this can be done in the coming weeks, the data will be added.
The analysis used mentions of the 11 parties that have the right to nominate lists and candidates without collecting voters’ signatures: United Russia, the CPRF, the LDPR, A Just Russia, New People, Yabloko, the Communists of Russia, the Direct Democracy Party, Rodina, the Party of Pensioners, and the Greens. If other parties stand in the election, they will be added to the monitoring.
We analysed posts on each platform and were interested in the following indicators:
the number of mentions (posts) on social networks, broken down by political party,
the number of mentions, broken down by platform,
engagement (reposts, reactions, activity in comments),
duplicate posts, which very often indicate centralised distribution of materials,
key topics,
use of administrative resources.