Social media monitoring report for the tenth week of the election campaign for the State Duma of the Russian Federation, IX convocation, scheduled for 20 September 2026
The "Election Atlas" project continues its weekly social media monitoring programme during the State Duma elections. We track how active election participants are in the online space.
The social media monitoring results are published weekly.
During the week of 18–24 August, 158,535 posts about parties were examined — almost one and a half times fewer than the week before. Since Yabloko has definitively dropped out of the election race, we no longer include that party's figures in our weekly analysis. However, this week we still kept posts mentioning Yabloko (9,491) in the total sum of all published posts. Without those posts, the decline would have been even more significant.
The main topics of the week were the arrest and subsequent removal from the election of CPRF candidate Nikolai Bondarenko, the formal exclusion of Yabloko from the federal ballot by the Central Election Commission, a new lawsuit by Rodina to cancel the registration of Yabloko's list in the regional elections in Pskov Oblast, and the second stage of the United Russia congress, where Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev spoke.
Key findings
The main event of the week for social media users was not the second stage of the United Russia congress with Vladimir Putin's speech, but the continuing wave of removals of candidates and parties from the elections. Among the most resonant triggers were the exclusion of CPRF candidate Nikolai Bondarenko, the sitting deputy of the Altai Krai Legislative Assembly Lyudmila Klyushnikova (also from the CPRF), and, in addition, new lawsuits to cancel Yabloko's registration at the regional level.
As a result, posts mentioning Vladimir Putin at the congress garnered 40.27 million views, whereas publications about registration cancellations and removals from the elections received 85.3 million views. That is twice as many, or 28.4% of the total views of all "party" publications for the week. The gap is also noticeable in engagement: publications about the president's speech collected 1.16 million reactions, while posts about Nikolai Bondarenko alone (excluding other candidates) collected 1.48 million.
Consequently, United Russia leads for the first time in several weeks across all three key metrics (mentions, views and activity), yet the online audience's interest in the congress proved incomparably lower than the attention from federal television channels. At the same time, a rapid growth in metrics was recorded for the CPRF: despite a reduction in the number of publications, the party nearly doubled its number of views and level of engagement. The figures for the remaining parties are falling. After the cancellation of Yabloko's registration, the main nerve of the elections is becoming the confrontation between United Russia and the CPRF.
Number of mentions
In the tenth week of the election campaign, 158,535 mentions of parties were recorded — 52.9% fewer than the week before (336,685). And if all posts mentioning Yabloko are excluded, the drop is even more severe — 55.7%. At the same time, the decline in the number of publications affected all parties: the Party of Direct Democracy fell by 79.1% (from 268 to 56), the Pensioners' Party — by 74.1% (from 2,684 to 695), Rodina — by 76.5% (from 9,275 to 2,179), A Just Russia — by 74.8% (from 89,889 to 22,645), New People — by 54.6% (from 10,464 to 4,752), the LDPR — by 52.8% (from 27,097 to 12,797), the Greens — by 47.9% (from 5,187 to 2,702), United Russia — by 38.5% (from 126,794 to 77,935), Communists of Russia — by 32.7% (from 1,663 to 1,120), the CPRF — by 26.2% (from 32,720 to 24,163) — a decline everywhere, but of varying depth.
United Russia leads in the number of mentions (77,935, almost half of all publications for the week), followed at a considerable distance by the CPRF (24,163) and A Just Russia (22,645), then the LDPR (12,797). The remaining six parties together accounted for 11,500 publications — 7.3% of the total volume.
On 21 August, CPRF State Duma candidate and popular video blogger Nikolai Bondarenko was detained in Saratov in a case concerning the display of "extremist symbols" — the formal pretext was a 2024 publication featuring a photograph of Alexei Navalny. Subsequently, a court found Bondarenko guilty and imposed a fine, which automatically leads to removal from the elections.
CPRF Central Committee Chairman Gennady Zyuganov publicly stated that he links the Bondarenko case with the cases of other party representatives — Mikhail Matveev and Vladimir Mikhailov — interpreting what is happening as systemic pressure on the CPRF ahead of the elections. In Tyumen, around a hundred people came out to a rally in support of Bondarenko and other removed candidates, and Penza Komsomol members held solo pickets.
The story of the cancellation of CPRF candidate Mikhail Matveev's registration, which began last week, took a new turn: the Samara administration refused to authorise a rally in his support, and the nationalist movement "Russian Community" spoke out in support of the removed communist — a rare example for this campaign of solidarity between ideologically distant forces.
In parallel, in Altai Krai, the krai court, following lawsuits from competitors, cancelled the registration of sitting Legislative Assembly deputy Lyudmila Klyushnikova (CPRF).
Meanwhile, in Pskov, Rodina filed a lawsuit to cancel the registration of Yabloko's regional list.
At the same time, the second stage of the United Russia congress took place with the participation of Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev. The party's programme was adopted at the congress. However, even such a significant event did not help, and the number of mentions of the party fell sharply. In this respect, the information space of social media differs substantially from the space of federal television channels, where the mention rate of the "party of power" and the volume of attention devoted to it grew 3–4 times over the same period.
Views
Total views of publications about parties amounted to 300.86 million: 28.8% fewer than the week before (when it was 422.40 million), i.e. noticeably less than the drop in the number of publications (-52.9%). If the Yabloko party is excluded from this figure, the total number of views equals 258.86 million, meaning the drop amounts to 39.7%, which is also lower than the drop in the number of mentions.
The average reach per post, accordingly, grew: from 1,255 to 1,898 views (+51.2%). This happened at the expense of two parties against the backdrop of major stories of their own — United Russia grew by 28.5% (from 91.01 to 116.92 million), while the CPRF doubled its figures (from 39.17 to 80.22 million). All the rest fell: the Party of Direct Democracy — by 97.4% (from 705.1 thousand to 18.5 thousand), Rodina — by 83.3% (from 40.21 to 6.69 million), the Pensioners' Party — by 67.8% (from 5.48 to 1.77 million), Communists of Russia — by 49.5% (from 3.99 to 2.01 million), the LDPR — by 47.7% (from 49.17 to 25.72 million), A Just Russia — by 52.8% (from 25.31 to 11.94 million), the Greens — by 37.8% (from 4.82 to 3.00 million), New People — by 32.5% (from 15.66 to 10.57 million).
In views, United Russia regained its leadership (116.92 million against 80.22 million for the CPRF), which it had ceded to Yabloko for two weeks in a row. The growth was driven by the second stage of the party congress: Vladimir Putin spoke at the plenary session and stated that Russia would hold elections at all levels "even in the most difficult conditions", while Dmitry Medvedev spoke about territories that would be "returning" to Russia and sharply criticised those who left the country after the start of the SMO. State Duma Chairman Vyacheslav Volodin also reported on his participation in the congress.
A separate story was a report about one of the United Russia leaders at the regional level: a video "Glamorous United Russia member" about the wealth of Tatarstan head Rustam Minnikhanov collected 464.9 thousand views — an example of how criticism of individual party representatives by ideological opponents continues to shape part of United Russia's reach alongside the party's official materials.
For the CPRF, the growth is almost entirely linked to the Bondarenko case (61.26 million views out of 80.22 million) and the removal of candidates in the regions. Despite the sharp drop in figures, mentions of Yabloko among non-party authors continue to garner noticeable reach. For example, Maxim Katz's video "Boycott the elections" (833.3 thousand views) and his analysis "How and why Yabloko was removed from the elections" (656.4 thousand) after the Supreme Court's appellate panel rejected the party's complaint. The party itself announced the continuation of the struggle and launched a campaign "Russia for peace and freedom".
The CEC formally excluded the party from the federal ballot — number 2 on the ballot is now unused.
For New People, noticeable reach was garnered by deputy Ksenia Goryacheva's initiative "Women want to know" — she proposed that candidates and party leaders answer questions about equality (412.5 thousand views).
At the same time, the party found itself at the centre of two less advantageous stories. In the first case, the party was showered with accusations that it had borrowed Yabloko's 2021 election slogan word for word (223.3 thousand views).
The second case is linked to announcements circulating on Telegram about the potential buying of votes in support of New People — judging by the wording and anonymity, this resembles a scam scheme parasitising on the party's name, rather than official activity by New People — there are 145 such publications, and all of them collected near-zero views.
For the LDPR, the most-viewed publication was party leader Leonid Slutsky's address on the need to double healthcare funding (1.02 million views) — a rare case where a post by a political heavyweight surpasses in reach news hooks with high engagement.
Also receiving noticeable resonance was the story of an LDPR candidate who wrote a report asking to be released from the front for the elections in Petersburg, but was instead sent to an assault unit (240.8 thousand views) — a storyline directly linking the SMO theme with the electoral process.
For the Greens, an initiative in Krasnoyarsk came to the fore: the party asked the election commission to check campaign photographs of United Russia candidate Irina Ivanova for signs of neural generation (264 thousand views) — a technological storyline rare for the campaign, not directly linked to the week's court stories.
Engagement
Aggregate engagement (reposts, reactions, comments) fell to 6.84 million — a 27.7% drop from 9.46 million the week before, meaning the decline is almost proportional to the drop in views (-28.8%), unlike the previous week, when engagement collapsed noticeably more sharply than reach. But if Yabloko's engagement is subtracted, the drop will be far steeper — to 5.72 million reactions, or 40%, since even after being removed from the elections the party continues to be a generator of emotions for social media users — it accounted for more than 1 million reactions this week, i.e. more than two parliamentary parties.
The same two parties that grew in views showed growth: United Russia grew by 49.8% (from 1.90 to 2.84 million), and the CPRF — by 85.1% (from 1.01 to 1.87 million). For the remaining parties, engagement fell: Rodina lost 87.7% (from 846.2 to 104.3 thousand), Communists of Russia — fell by 80.9%, the Pensioners' Party — by 78.9%, the Party of Direct Democracy — by 88.7%, the Greens — by 65.2%, the LDPR — by 45.6% (to 460.5 thousand), A Just Russia — by 48.3% (to 164.8 thousand), New People — by 32.2% (to 183.2 thousand).
United Russia also regained its leadership in engagement (2.84 million against 1.87 million for the CPRF) — last week Yabloko held primacy in both metrics. Among publications about the congress, the greatest reaction was garnered not by the programme statements themselves, but by more provocative remarks. For example, a post about Dmitry Medvedev's words regarding Russians who left (365.3 thousand views, 19.3 thousand reactions) spread noticeably more actively than neutral retellings of Putin's speech.
For the CPRF, the greatest engagement was collected by publications about Bondarenko's arrest and his trial: a report on his arrest (1.33 million views, 52.9 thousand reactions and comments) and news about the fine (1.35 million views, 44.7 thousand).
For Yabloko, noticeable engagement was garnered by a statement from the head of the party's analytical centre, Ivan Bolshakov. He drew attention to the fact that United Russia, as a result of a random draw by the CEC, received the first spot on the ballot in 21 out of 39 regions in the regional parliament elections. According to his calculations, the probability of such a coincidence under a truly random distribution is 0.00000378%, i.e. approximately 1 chance in 26 million. The story was also confirmed by Meduza: in total, the storyline about the draw collected around 465 publications and 2.79 million views. No comment from the CEC or United Russia on the substance of the probability calculation was found in the collected dataset.
Dynamics of publication distribution by platform
For this metric, we have not yet excluded Yabloko: the party's figures do not change the overall picture, and the fluctuations overall proved to be small. Telegram's share fell from 46.7% in the ninth week to 42.0% in the tenth, VKontakte's share — from 45.5% to 40.2%. Both largest platforms sagged roughly equally. MAX's share, on the contrary, more than doubled — from 7.0% to 16.3% — while the absolute number of publications on the platform even grew slightly (from 23,555 to 25,824, +9.6%), whereas Telegram and VKontakte lost more than half of their volume in absolute figures (-57.7% and -58.4% respectively). YouTube's share grew from 0.86% to 1.55% — a continuation of the trend of recent weeks, when major political storylines consistently generate a wave of analytical videos.
Administrative resource
Among the week's publications, one direct and detailed case of administrative pressure on an opposition candidate's campaigning was found. In Irkutsk Oblast, Yabloko's single-mandate candidate for the State Duma elections, Pavel Kharitonenko, reported that the mayor of Baikalsk, United Russia member Vasily Temgenevsky, personally called local entrepreneurs and demanded they take down his campaign banner with the slogan "For peace and freedom", which had hung at the market for about a week without any complaints. The story was independently confirmed by the outlets "Ostorozhno, novosti" and Meduza. According to Kharitonenko, arguments about the legality and paid registration of the campaigning had no effect on the mayor. No comment from United Russia or the Baikalsk mayor's office on the described episode was found in the collected publication parsing dataset.
The remaining episodes of the week that the opposition links to the use of administrative and coercive resources were formally conducted through the courts or the election commission on specific legal grounds. The Bondarenko case is built on the article on displaying "extremist symbols", the Klyushnikova case in Altai Krai — on lawsuits from competitors, and Yabloko's exclusion from the ballot became a technical consequence of an earlier Supreme Court ruling. The CPRF and allied groups describe this series of decisions as a planned "clearing" of the electoral field of inconvenient candidates, while the formal side of each case is institutionally underpinned: courts, the CEC, regional election commissions, references to specific legal norms are cited, and the authorities explain what is happening as the enforcement of the law.
Separately, it is worth mentioning again the Samara administration's refusal to authorise a rally in support of the removed CPRF candidate Mikhail Matveev — this restriction concerns not the candidate's registration itself, but the subsequent possibility of publicly expressing disagreement with the court's decision, which is also sometimes described as part of the administrative resource in a broad sense.
Centralised activity: networks of channels
Both previously documented networks of small accounts remain active for the third week in a row and produce near-zero real engagement: the network of VKontakte pages "A Just Russia — News [city]" (820 pages, 15,160 publications, 1.58 million views, but only 215 reactions and comments) continues to mechanically reprint Sergei Mironov's statements — this week about food prices, a 13th salary for public-sector employees and benefits for veterans, without any mentions of opposition parties.
More telling this time was the second network — around 2,578 tracked Telegram channels of the kompromat format. A longread was discovered about the "oligarchic coup" of 2003, accusing the CPRF of a historical collusion with Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Anatoly Chubais — its reposts yielded 2,628 publications across 2,621 separate Telegram channels, of which 2,488 (94.9%) are on the list of tracked kompromat channels. In total, the material collected around 80.4 thousand views and around a hundred reactions — i.e. fewer views than the largest individual publications of the week.
A separate description is merited by the YouTube Shorts content farm of New People mentions: over the week, 448 videos were discovered across 19 channels with uniform clickbait titles such as "New People revealed details… #Shorts" or "What are New People hiding? #Shorts". Views of individual videos range from zero to 1.4 thousand. Unlike the kompromat network, these videos do not contain exposé content — this is, rather, templated activity using the party's name as a keyword for recommendation algorithms, with no visible connection to New People's official activities.
Methodology
For the social media monitoring, four platforms currently used by Russians were selected: VKontakte, MAX, Telegram, YouTube. Unfortunately, we are unable to set up effective monitoring of Odnoklassniki and Instagram, which could affect the overall data.
The analysis used mentions of the 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, Communists of Russia, the Party of Direct Democracy, Rodina, the Pensioners' Party, the Greens.
We analysed posts on each platform and were interested in the following metrics:
number of mentions (posts) on social media broken down by political party,
number of mentions broken down by platform,
engagement (reposts, reactions, activity in comments),
duplicate posts, which very often indicate centralised dissemination of materials,
key topics,
use of administrative resource.