For a long time, campaigning on social media was not regulated at all, which gave the opposition an opportunity to partly maintain parity with administrative candidates. That is because in all other types of campaigning the latter have prevailed for at least the last twenty years.
The situation changed in 2021, when the internet was recognised as a full-fledged campaigning environment. The additional regulation created considerable problems for independent candidates. After a number of social media platforms were banned in 2022, the opposition’s campaigning opportunities shrank substantially, while the risks increased.
Social media before their formal inclusion in the campaigning sphere
For a long time, campaigning on social media was not regulated by law at all. Some opposition candidates took advantage of this and ran quite successful campaigns.
For example, in the 2019 Moscow City Duma elections, independent candidates Yevgeny Stupin, Maxim Kruglov and Daria Besedina won largely thanks to their use of social media.
However, even with social media, as it turned out, administrative resources made it possible to create an advantage for approved candidates.
There is a study of social-media mentions of candidates from Chuvashia throughout the entire 2020 election campaign. A total of 2,577 posts about these regional elections were found.
Of those, 33% (852 posts) were about the incumbent acting governor, Oleg Nikolayev. His main competitor — the communist Andreyev — is mentioned 419 times, i.e. half as often.
The main campaigning at that time took place on VKontakte. Paid-placement public pages with the largest reach published promotional posts in the interests of administrative candidates, while the opposition was refused without explanation.
Several waves of absolutely identical posts were recorded, matching down to the last error and clearly written by political technologists, which were passed off as “native”. Such posts usually appeared in 15–25 regional public pages almost simultaneously.
Here is an example of such a post:
“What I really DIDN’T like about the past debates with Oleg Nikolayev — the attempts by some opponents to score points by trying to needle the acting governor.
The LDPR candidate, for example, babbled away his time and said ‘you can turn off the TV, there won’t be anything interesting after this’. Elections are elections, but we do need to respect each other.”
Placement in public pages is paid, but in the absence of a requirement to pay for campaigning from the electoral fund, administrative candidates get the opportunity to publish as many posts as they deem necessary. At the same time, administrators’ refusal to work with the opposition is also explained by administrative resources: a disloyal public page can simply be shut down, and its admins can be held liable on real or invented grounds.
Here we are interested in Federal Law No. 93-FZ of 21 July 2005 “On Amendments to Legislative Acts of the Russian Federation on Elections and Referendums and Other Legislative Acts of the Russian Federation”.
This law establishes a ban on campaigning by state and municipal employees.
Meanwhile, on social media this provision of the law is systematically violated. In practice, campaign materials are posted on the accounts of state bodies, municipalities, schools, vocational schools and universities, libraries, sports schools and clubs, polyclinics and indeed any organisations connected with budget money.
That said, observation of the process showed that user engagement with such promotion is minimal — likes and comments usually number in the single digits, meaning they are almost certainly made by the political technologists themselves and the organisations’ employees.
Thus, during the 2020 campaign in Leningrad Oblast, the incumbent governor Drozdenko was mentioned on social media 3,515 times, yet on average each post garnered 14 reactions (likes, comments and reposts combined). For the acting governor of Irkutsk Oblast, Kobzev, this engagement figure is 8. For the acting governor of Arkhangelsk Oblast, Tsybulsky — 9.3.
Mentions of opposition candidates were far fewer, but they do exist and more often provoke a response from social-media users — but these posts are placed not in public pages, but on users’ personal pages. In independent candidates’ campaigns, this method of campaigning was used and was often successful.
Social media after their formal inclusion in the campaigning sphere
Federal Law No. 43-FZ of 09.03.2021 “On Amendments to Certain Legislative Acts of the Russian Federation” extended the rules and requirements for election campaigning to the entire internet space.
Under this law, the CEC establishes the specifics of producing and distributing campaign materials on the internet: in particular, all platforms where information about a person who has been nominated as a candidate may be posted must be registered with the election commission as “campaign” platforms. And if illegal campaigning on the internet is detected, election commissions at all levels are obliged to apply to the court, Roskomnadzor and law-enforcement bodies.
The law was not supported by the systemic opposition and passed solely with the votes of United Russia.
This law is applied extremely selectively, “overlooking” campaigning in favour of pro-government candidates; but it rolls over independent ones like a steamroller.
For example, in the 2022 elections of deputies to the State Council of the Udmurt Republic of the seventh convocation, the Ustinovsky TEC of the city of Izhevsk deemed a post on the personal VKontakte page of candidate Dmitry Begishev (A Just Russia) to be illegal campaigning. The post in question was a publication with the headline: “New faces, but old methods!” The commission assessed the content of the post as campaigning and applied the requirements to it: before posting it in the public domain, the candidate should have submitted screenshots of the campaign material to the commission, as well as information about the producer and the client. After that, the TEC sent a submission to Roskomnadzor to stop the dissemination of the publication and applied to the police with a demand to hold the responsible person liable under Article 5.12 of the Code of Administrative Offences.
In 2024, activist Yaroslav Kostrov was removed from municipal elections in St Petersburg. An article about the problems of building a High-Speed Railway station was posted in the VKontakte public page “Tsentralny District for a Comfortable Living Environment”. The court considered this to be campaigning, and moreover placed on a resource not registered as a campaign one, and removed Kostrov from the elections. At the same time, the candidate himself asserted that he did not post the item — another admin of the public page did — and therefore it could not in any way constitute campaigning, but the court paid no attention to his arguments.
After the start of the full-scale war and the banning of foreign social media in 2022, VKontakte and Odnoklassniki effectively remained as participants in election campaigns. They are directly controlled by the Presidential Administration (the CEO of the VK corporation, which owns both social networks, is Vladimir Kiriyenko, the son of the deputy head of the Russian Presidential Administration).
Interestingly, the situation in public pages formally looks relatively decent. Researchers found that, when searching for posts about candidates that mention elections, approved candidates are mentioned not much more often than independent ones. Sometimes parity is even established between them in this context.
For example, in Vologda Oblast in the 2024 elections, gubernatorial candidate Filimonov (United Russia) is mentioned on networks 837 times, and these posts have an audience of 1.1 million. His competitors: Morozov (CPRF) — 808 mentions and 1 million audience; Grimov (LDPR) — 782 and also 1 million.
However, observers explain this not by real equality in internet campaigning, but by the fact that in the context of elections candidates are usually mentioned in formal posts devoted to the elections themselves. Meanwhile, real campaigning is conducted differently.
Campaign posts in public pages like “Overheard” mimic informational ones; a genuine shadow election campaign is being waged. At the same time, opposition candidates are practically unable to seep in there, since the networks are fully under state control. For example, in the popular VKontakte regional group “Overheard | Altai Republic”, acting governor Andrei Turchak is mentioned 48 times during the campaign (each time outside the context of elections), while his two opponents — not once.
The use of networked administrative resources also continued: the posting of de facto campaigning on the accounts of official government bodies and budget-funded organisations.
Thus, in Samara Oblast in 2024, the pro-government gubernatorial candidate was the incumbent acting governor Vyacheslav Fedorishchev. One of the deputies of the Samara Duma told some round table how important it was that Fedorishchev had been appointed head of the commission on industry under the President of the Russian Federation. This speech, most valuable for all Samara residents, was first disseminated in full, or in excerpts and commentary on it, by regional media, and then it went through all official social-media accounts connected in any way with the administration.
On 30 July 2024, municipal organisations in Tatarstan simultaneously posted a video on their social media campaigning for Rasim Baksikov — a “special military operation participant” who was running as number two on the United Russia list for the State Council of Tatarstan.
Despite the fact that many such publications became illegal after the aforementioned 2021 law No. 43-FZ, no legal consequences ensue for pro-government candidates.
Social media as a tool for a new electoral filter
Federal Law No. 157-FZ of 4 June 2021 “On Amendments to Article 4 of the Federal Law ‘On Basic Guarantees of Electoral Rights and the Right to Participate in a Referendum of Citizens of the Russian Federation’ and Article 4 of the Federal Law ‘On the Election of Deputies of the State Duma of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation’” restricted the passive electoral right for people whose ties to an “extremist organisation” are proven by a court. For leaders, a ban of five years; for everyone else — three years.
This law is widely used to cut the opposition off from elections, most often for any images connected with Navalny, the FBK or the social networks Facebook and Instagram.
For example, on 18 July 2026, the Pskov City Court fined Tatyana Pasman, a deputy of the Pskov Legislative Assembly from Yabloko, for “displaying Nazi symbols”. At the same time, according to the statement of Pskov Yabloko itself, the publication was not made by Tatyana Pasman; another person is indicated as the author (moreover, the publication itself was in a private account and has already been deleted). Tatyana was fined 1,000 roubles under an article that prohibits her, a sitting deputy, from participating in elections to the Pskov Legislative Assembly and to the State Duma, where documents had already been submitted for registration as a candidate.
Under the same article, other members of Pskov Yabloko were also fined: Artur Gaiduk, Svetlana Vasilkova, Ivan Prishchepa and Tatyana Fedorova; all of them are also deprived of the right to be elected.
On 19 July 2026, Boris Nadezhdin, one of the independent favourites of the 2024 presidential election, abandoned the continuation of his State Duma campaign. Nadezhdin was fined the same thousand roubles for posting a link back in 2023. The link leads to a video on YouTube on Elvira Vikhareva’s channel. In that video, a portrait of Alexei Navalny appears for a few seconds. The court deemed this fact to be a “display of extremist symbols” by Nadezhdin himself. As Boris Nadezhdin stated, he withdrew from the election campaign so as not to put his supporters at risk.
The most recent novelty is Federal Law No. 130-FZ of 02.05.2026 “On Amendments to Certain Legislative Acts of the Russian Federation”. It banned the use in campaigning of the voices, videos and images of deceased people, as well as images of people generated using artificial intelligence.
It is clear why the CPRF voted against this law — communists will now be unable to use Lenin and Stalin in campaigning.
It is strange that the LDPR voted “for”, as it will have to give up the image of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who to this day remains the party’s main “locomotive”.
We will see how this law is applied in the course of the current election campaign.