Report on social media monitoring for the eighth week of the election campaign for the election of deputies to the State Duma of the Russian Federation of the IX convocation, scheduled for 20 September 2026
The Elections Atlas project continues its programme of weekly social media monitoring during the State Duma election campaign. We are tracking the online activity of election participants.
The results of the social media monitoring are published weekly.
For the week of 4–10 August, 447,442 posts were studied.
Key findings
The cancellation of the Yabloko party’s candidate list registration was by far the main news story of the week, producing record figures across all key metrics. Compared with last week, engagement with posts mentioning Yabloko increased 18-fold, and over the last month — 80-fold.
These indicators are also rising for other parties, but this is often also an effect of Yabloko’s removal from the election. Total views nearly tripled, and engagement increased almost fourfold. Audience attention to the election agenda rose sharply precisely this week, and it noticeably outpaces the growth in the number of publications.
As a result, for the first time since the start of the campaign, United Russia lost first place in the “views” and “engagement” metrics (in the latter case it fell to third place, also being overtaken by Rodina). Yabloko and Rodina — the parties to the court proceedings — together accounted for 46.6% of all views for the week and 58.8% of all engagement, despite their share of the total number of posts being noticeably more modest — 12.8%. Thus it was the substantive, not the quantitative, factor that was decisive for the week’s indicators.
Number of mentions
In the eighth week of the election campaign (4–10 August), 447,442 mentions of parties were recorded — 17.3% more than the week before (381,612). This growth is largely due to the attack on Yabloko. As a result, the number of posts mentioning Yabloko increased sixfold over the week (from 5,372 to 38,426), and Rodina — 3.5 times (from 5,398 to 19,066). However, other “small” parties also saw noticeable growth: the Direct Democracy Party increased its number of mentions from 71 to 198 (+178.9%), the Greens — from 4,400 to 12,246 (+178.3%), and the Communists of Russia — from 3,387 to 6,131 (+81.0%). For the remaining parties, fluctuations were less significant: New People added 28.6% (from 13,262 to 17,055), the CPRF — 17.1% (from 38,777 to 45,390), the LDPR — 15.6% (from 31,274 to 36,168), and United Russia — 4.9% (from 159,190 to 167,062). The number of posts decreased slightly for A Just Russia (-12.5%, from 117,661 to 102,963) and the Party of Pensioners (-2.9%, from 2,820 to 2,737).
The increase in publications about Yabloko and Rodina is directly linked to the court proceedings: on 7 August, Rodina filed a lawsuit with the Supreme Court to cancel the registration of Yabloko’s federal list, and on 10 August the court considered it and granted it, cancelling the party’s registration (a detailed chronology is in the section “The Yabloko case: chronology, positions and reaction”).
Some of these publications were in the nature of a centrally coordinated placement of negative comments about Yabloko. For example, an identical text with a direct quote from Rodina leader Alexei Zhuravlev was posted 194 times in MAX messenger channels: “The Yabloko party are national traitors. These are people who work for the West, these are people who are close to Western values. Those who demand our capitulation.” But overall, there were fewer such publications than might have been expected.
The growth for the Direct Democracy Party is almost entirely linked not to its own campaigning, but to mocking publications about the party in blogs and Telegram channels — for example, a post from the channel “Usy Willy Tokareva”, which ironically calls the party “ideal candidates” against the backdrop of Yabloko’s removal.
A cross-cutting theme of the week, affecting all parties at once, was the CEC lottery for allocating places on the ballot paper: the most popular post about the lottery results garnered over 1.5 million views — this was the most widely circulated story of the week not directly related to the Yabloko case.
Views
The growth in the number of views of publications about parties significantly outpaces the growth in the number of publications — this figure nearly tripled. The largest increases were naturally shown by Rodina (+1,326.7%, to 94.73 million) and Yabloko (+1,036.5%, to 200.50 million). Also noticeably increased were the CPRF (+75.3%, to 38.70 million), the LDPR (+85.3%, to 85.63 million), A Just Russia (+56.6%, to 44.42 million), the Communists of Russia (+184.3%, to 14.16 million), the Direct Democracy Party (+307.5%, to 328,850) and United Russia (+35.0%, to 110.28 million).
The main source of views for the week was the Yabloko disqualification case. As a result, the leader in this indicator changed for the first time this week: Yabloko almost doubled United Russia, and Rodina rose to third place, leaving the CPRF, the SRs and New People far behind.
The greatest reach among United Russia’s publications was achieved by the news about the extension of the “garage amnesty” until 2031 — Vladimir Putin signed the corresponding law drafted by United Russia deputies (4.46 million views, the most viewed post of the week among all parties). For the LDPR, the greatest reach was achieved by publications about a picket outside the FAS demanding the return of 103 billion rubles of overpayments for housing and utilities to the public — for example, a post (1.95 million views) and another one (1.77 million views) about the party activists’ action.
Engagement
Total engagement (reposts, reactions, comments) rose to 14.90 million (+281.5% from 3.91 million the week before) — an even stronger increase than for views.
The maximum increase in engagement was shown by Rodina (+3,994.6%, to 2.87 million) and Yabloko (+1,692.8%, to 5.89 million) — the parties to the court proceedings. As a result, both parties overtook United Russia in this indicator, also for the first time in the entire campaign. The largest number of reactions was garnered by a purely informational post about Yabloko’s removal from the election.
Engagement increased substantially for the Direct Democracy Party (+753.0%), the Communists of Russia (+358.4%), A Just Russia (+119.0%), the LDPR (+94.9%), the CPRF (+86.9%) and the Party of Pensioners (+68.8%). The smallest increases were for United Russia (+50.5%) and New People (+16.7%).
However, the growth for many of these parties (especially the Direct Democracy Party) is again driven by Yabloko’s removal.
For United Russia, a quote from war correspondent Yevgeny Poddubny about veterans of the special military operation going to the elections under the party’s flags gathered noticeable engagement — the publication garnered 644,000 views and 94,300 reactions. However, it is important to see what the reactions under this post actually were — the number of positive and negative reactions was almost equal.
For A Just Russia and the CPRF, a significant portion of the week’s engagement was generated by statements from party leaders against Yabloko: Sergei Mironov (A Just Russia) repeatedly called on the Ministry of Justice and the Prosecutor General’s Office to check Yabloko because of its anti-war stance, and Gennady Zyuganov (CPRF) criticised the party for its lack of support for participants in the special military operation.
For the Communists of Russia, the greatest engagement was gathered by a publication of an initiative to rename the game of bowling to “Bogatyr”.
Dynamics of publication distribution by platform
Among publications for which distribution by platform can be compared week over week (10 out of 11 parties; see “Methodology”), Telegram’s share rose from 47.6% in the seventh week to 51.1% in the eighth. VKontakte, remaining the second-largest platform, decreased its share from 47.5% to 41.7%. MAX increased its share from 4.6% to 6.7%, YouTube remained at around 0.5% share, but is showing steady growth.
The Yabloko case: chronology, positions and reaction
The proceedings over Yabloko’s removal from the election were not the only pressure on the party during the week, but the culmination of a series of episodes:
The first publicly recorded attack on the party in the monitoring occurred on 5 August: according to the Communists of Russia’s own channel, immediately after the CEC lottery, their leader Sergei Malinkovich “severely reprimanded” Yabloko representatives for their “pro-Western views”;
The next day, 6 August, this criticism was supported by CPRF leader Gennady Zyuganov, who stated that Yabloko “does not support the policy of strengthening statehood” in the context of the special military operation and did not help “those who fought at the front”;
A Just Russia leader Sergei Mironov appealed to the Ministry of Justice and the Prosecutor General’s Office demanding a check of the party because of its anti-war stance, calling its propaganda “anti-Russian” — the topic was picked up and circulated by Telegram channels.
On 7 August, the Rodina party filed a lawsuit with the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation to cancel the registration of Yabloko’s federal list. On the same day, the St. Petersburg City Court dismissed a separate lawsuit, unrelated to Rodina’s claim, filed by Yabloko itself to overturn the refusal to register its list for the city parliament election — an independent regional episode of pressure on the party during the same week.
On 10 August, the Supreme Court began hearing Rodina’s lawsuit: Rodina’s representatives stated that Yabloko had conducted campaigning on social networks blocked in Russia, a CEC representative pointed to possible copyright violations, Rodina’s lawyer attempted to find evidence for these accusations, but Yabloko’s lawyer during the hearing presented evidence to the contrary. The court also heard data from Rosfinmonitoring on the party’s financing through third parties from the USA and Germany, and the Prosecutor General’s Office argued for the party’s removal from the election. Yabloko chair Nikolai Rybakov called on the court to dismiss the lawsuit, but on the same day the court granted Rodina’s demand and cancelled the registration of the federal list; the Yabloko party stated its intention to appeal the decision.
Separately, an unconfirmed report was circulated that representatives of the presidential administration criticised official Alexander Kharichev for allowing Yabloko to participate in the election, despite data from certain closed polls showing fairly high support for this party (allegedly 12% ready to vote for Yabloko, with this figure reaching 19% in border regions). The publication was disseminated through anonymous Telegram channels of the same type that publish kompromat on various politicians (see the “Network activity” section below). However, it is important to note that this information has not been confirmed by any official source.
Centralised activity: channel networks and contribution to indicators
A significant part of the week’s aggregate indicators is formed by the distributed publication of the same materials through networks of small accounts. The largest network detected, which we have written about previously, has at least 1,115 VKontakte pages with uniform names like “A Just Russia — News [city]” / “A Just Russia — [city]” (for example, in the localities of Sheksna, Nizhnyaya Tura, Maloyaz; from 0 to almost 35,000 subscribers, median — 252), which mechanically republish statements by party leader Sergei Mironov as “local news”. Over the week, these pages produced at least 54,532 publications (at a threshold of roughly 10 literal copies per post) within 54 different formulations of statements and garnered 7.10 million views, but only 1,070 reactions and comments across all publications combined — the network has views, but almost no real audience engagement. Among the statements distributed in this way was an anti-Yabloko one: the quote “The so-called Yabloko party is once again trying to get into the State Duma… traitors to the Motherland” was disseminated through this network 2,184 times, garnering 287,472 views and only two reactions in total — the other formulations concern other party topics (pensions, salaries, housing and utilities, support for special military operation participants, and others).
Another detected network is structured differently: about two thousand small Telegram channels (around 100 subscribers, slightly less than 10 views per post) with depersonalised “investigative” or “insider” names (for example, Ministry of Untruth, Capital Insiders; median — 70 subscribers and one view per publication) disseminated approximately 150 different compromising stories about politicians and regional officials over the week (134,555 publications), but garnered a total of only 167,257 views and 35 reactions — an average of about 1.2 views per publication. Yabloko is not the main topic of this network: of the 134,555 publications, only 1,806 (1.3%) contain the word “Yabloko”, and the majority of them (1,180) are not about the Supreme Court decision of 10 August, but a reprint of an earlier story (see below); the remaining 626 publications mentioning the party are mostly neutral mentions (the CEC ballot lottery, the list of election participants, etc.). The network reflected the actual court ruling in only about 10 publications.
An interesting pattern in the content: 1,180 publications from this network about the “hunt for Yabloko in Petrozavodsk” — the detention of the head of the Yabloko faction in the Petrozavodsk City Council, Dmitry Rybakov — are dated 4, 5 and 10 August, i.e., the week of the Supreme Court hearing, although the detention itself occurred in May 2026, and the case was closed with a fine of 1,000 rubles as early as 26 May (Kommersant, RBC Karelia). The network is thus re-releasing a story already closed in May under fresh dates, creating the appearance of a new news story about the “hunt for Yabloko” at the height of the court proceedings with Rodina — while the same network devoted far fewer publications to the federal topic itself (the decision of 10 August).
Methodology
For the social media monitoring, four platforms currently used by Russians were selected: VKontakte, MAX, Telegram, YouTube. Unfortunately, we have not yet been able to establish effective monitoring of Odnoklassniki and Instagram, which could significantly affect the overall data. If this becomes possible in the coming weeks, the data will be added.
The analysis used mentions of 11 parties that have the right to nominate lists and candidates without collecting voter 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 are nominated for 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.