Social Networks in Modern Political Communications: a Concept Analysis of Foreign Periodicals

Abstract

Over the past two decades, Russian and foreign researchers have documented the growing influence of social networks on political communication. The Internet has become a new mass media. In Russia, bloggers with more than 3,000 subscribers acquire a mass media status. Internet users are not passive recipients of messages: they distribute them and generate their own content. The Internet is a different kind of reality, where anything is possible. Traditional mass media are less efficient than the Internet in providing news. As a result, the Internet and social networks have become a new means of political interaction. The COVID-19 pandemic boosted the digitalization of mass communications and made this process irreversible. The present article reviews 250 foreign research papers published by Taylor and Francis, Oxford University Press, and SAGE Publications in 2020–2021. The objective was to determine the attractiveness of political communication in social networks as a research topic. 12 % of the articles featured the role of social nets in political communication, Facebook being the most popular research material. A similar amount of papers focused on the behavior of network users and the role of the state in the management of social networks. Foreign terms used to describe the research topic appeared to be different from those used by Russian linguists. For instance, foreign authors use "social media" as a synonym for "sites of social networks", while Russian scientists prefer a much broader interpretation. Some terms and acronyms, such as SNSa, are absent from Russian works. Foreign authors exploit classical political science theories to study the issues of political content, the effect of social networks on protest movements and racial conflicts, and the use of new media in election campaigns. They are unfamiliar with Russian approaches to empirical data analysis, e.g. theory of "weak ties", "close world", two-stage flow of communication, the concept of "third place", etc.