Perception of Political Information in Online Communication on the Social Network VKontakte: Features of Content Consumption by Student Representatives

Social network sites act as a platform for communication between political actors and their audience. The actors broadcast their position and value judgments in order to form public opinion, gain support and provoke appropriate actions from the target audience. The digital communication strategies used by political actors are based on several principles: remoteness from the recipient of information, suggestibility and constant change of visual content, which allows maintaining communication between the supplier and consumer of content for a long period, the speed of information dissemination between both donors and recipients. Thus, the effectiveness of digital communication between politicians and students through blogging and the linguistic categories used by political actors in communication strategies will be evaluated. The paper will present the results of a content analysis of the posts of the leaders of three political parties- United Russia, LDPR and Just Russia- Patriots- for the Truth (due to the lack of an empirical base for others) about the presidential elections in Russia in March 2024, posted in the official groups of the parties on the Vkontakte), as well as in-depth interviews and questionnaires of students in order to identify their perception and reaction to these posts. Thus, the semantic structure directed by a political entity with an assessment of elections, as well as their perception by students (using the example of students of Yaroslavl State University named after P.G. Demidov) and students’ vision of political digital communication strategies among representatives of three parties will be evaluated.