The Digitally Mediated Public Sphere on Vkontakte in Russia 2020

Abstract

This report is an extension of the IREX report "The Digitally Mediated Public Sphere in Russia 2018," which described the Russian social and political landscape in 2018 through the lens of network mappings of Russian users of Twitter and Facebook. The current work analyzes the Russian social and political landscape in 2020 through the lens of a network mapping of Russian VKontakte users. While the two landscapes do not align perfectly in time, the addition of VKontakte provides an important new dimension for describing large-scale trends among the Russian public.

Keywords: social media, public sphere, social movements

JEL Classification: C60