Promotion of political leaders in social networks: experience of the 2011-2012 election campaigns

Kostyunina Elizaveta Dmitrievna PhD in History Postgraduate student; Faculty of History; Lomonosov Moscow State University 108803, Russia, city, village of Voskresenskoe, . , 20 kostiunina99@mail.ru

This study is devoted to the main trends and the role of the processes of promoting political leaders in social networks in the early 2010s, namely, in the election campaigns for the election of deputies of the State Duma of the VI convocation in 2011 and the presidential elections of the Russian Federation in 2012. The object of the study is the election campaigns of 2011-2012, the subject of the study is strategies for promoting political forces and figures on social networks. The work involves both general scientific methods (analysis, synthesis, classification) and special methods of historical and political science research (historical-comparative, historical-systemic, etc.)

The study of the role of the Internet in the electoral processes of late 2011 and early 2012 is particularly relevant, because it was during this period, on the one hand, that social networks, microblogs and other Web 2.0 resources were used so widely and variously in federal political campaigns, and on the other hand, patterns of interaction were formed. states, societies, and political elites that defined many features of the party and political development of the Russian Federation in the 2010s and 2020s. The scientific novelty of the research is due to the actual lack of works that would focus on this issue, considering it from the point of view of event, conceptual and technological aspects at the same time.

The problems and trends of promoting political leaders in social networks in relation to the early 2010s, on the one hand, were not independently investigated, on the other hand, they became the subject of study in publications on related issues – the problems of using the Internet in electoral campaigns, the problems of using electronic communications in political PR activities, as well as in works about functional – linguistic, technological, semantic – aspects of political activity in social networks. Speaking about the historiographical discussion on the issue of strategies for promoting political forces and leaders in social networks during the period under review, two directions can be distinguished – "optimists" and "skeptics". For the first direction, represented by the works of I. N. Efimova, A.V. Makoveychuk ^[3], M. I. Rykhtik ^[16], A.V. Toshcheva ^[20], O. N. Morozova ^[11], P. N. Karpov ^[7], D. A. Voynov ^[1], D. V. Tatmanyan ^[18], D. R. Fatykhova ^[21], N. A. Podosokorsky ^[13], A. S. Lukyantsev ^[10], M. S. Tantsura, R. A. Gritsenko, D. D. Prokopchuk ^[19] - conclusions about the positive aspects of using social networks to promote political leaders and forces are more typical: resource efficiency, adaptability for dialogue between a politician and his audience, self-regulation, dynamism, equal accessibility for different political forces, the potential to involve a new audience in the processes of civil society, etc. Their opponents, S. V. Volodenkov ^[2], N. V. Rosenberg ^[14], K. A. Krainova ^[8], V. Y. Zholudev ^[4], V. V. Pogrebnyak ^[12], focus on the manipulativeness, non–verifiability, and populism inherent in this field.

The use of social networks in political practice in the early 2010s was particularly important due to its multidimensional nature. Firstly, in foreign electoral cycles, the campaign of Barack Obama, who became president of the United States in 2008, is considered to be the first example of a full-scale successful use of social media to promote a political leader. It is the success of promoting this candidate from the Democratic Party in the first place - on social networks.Twitter (access is restricted in the Russian Federation) and Facebook (owned by Meta Corporation, which was recognized as an extremist organization in the Russian Federation on March 21, 2022) have attracted the attention of politicians and political strategists both in Europe and in the Russian Federation. With regard to political leaders, the trend was indeed becoming global – for example, as of early 2011, only one of the G8 leaders did not have personal pages on social networks. Secondly, the technological and infrastructural aspect of the penetration of the Internet and social networks into Russian society has also reached a certain maturity. According to TNS estimates, in 2010 the audience of the main social networks (domestic and foreign) grew by 22% and reached 27 million people, which no longer allowed ignoring such a significant proportion of the potential electorate on the eve of the new election cycle. A striking part of the infrastructural component of this process has been the avalanche–like growth in the popularity of smartphones - powerful mobile phones with Internet access functions. In the first 6 months of 2011, smartphone sales increased by 118%, reaching 2.8 million units ^[15], which, in turn, brought the overall smartphone penetration rate in the country to 20%. For the first time, the price of a basic-level smartphone dropped below 10,000 rubles ($360) with an average salary of 22,777 rubles ($814). Thus, the need to allocate resources to promote political leaders on social media got on the agenda in 2011-2012 due to a complex set of interrelated reasons.

The election campaigns for the election of deputies to the State Duma of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation of the VI convocation on December 4, 2011 and for the election of the President of the Russian Federation on March 4, 2012 should be considered key for the period under review. At the first, with a turnout of 60.21%, United Russia received 49.31% of the vote, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation - 19.19%, Just Russia - 13.25%, the Liberal Democratic Party of the Russian Federation - 11.68%; Yabloko, Patriots of Russia and Pravoe Delo did not enter parliament. In the 2012 presidential election, V.V. Putin won with a turnout of 65.34% with a result of 63.6%, G.A. Zyuganov scored 17.18%, M.D. Prokhorov – 7.98%, V.V. Zhirinovsky – 6.22%, S.M. Mironov – 3.85%.

In the run–up to the 2011 elections, all participating parties, including those that did not make it to the final parliament, created official accounts on the VKontakte social network and on the Twitter microblogging service. By the middle of 2011, the party leaders, V.V. Zhirinovsky, M.D. Prokhorov, and S.M. Mironov, also had active official pages, while G.A. Zyuganov had a page only on VKontakte. For S.M. Mironov, his own social network, Associates, played an important role in promoting him as an independent leader and as the head of the federal list of the Just Russia party. A social network of this kind, in addition to the obvious functions of informing and increasing the visibility (recognition) of the candidate, pursued the goal of mobilizing and consolidating the party's supporters, as well as forming a certain image of the political force and its leader in the eyes of a predominantly young audience. The message about the launch of the social network explicitly noted its emphasized focus on working with the image of S.M. Mironov as a political leader: "In this case, Mironov acts as a public figure who initiated the creation of this social network," the project managers emphasize. They note that "the Associates network is aimed at uniting people with an active civic position who are interested in or directly involved in public and political activities." At the same time, the portal administrators www.soratniki-online.ru They do not hide the fact that "Associates" are all those who are somehow connected with the personality of Sergei Mironov: through the Just Russia party, his public activities, who are brought closer to him by years of cooperation or simple human friendship" ^[17].

It should be noted that S.M. Mironov has been most actively using the Internet for his own promotion and promotion of associated political forces since 2010, when he was Chairman of the Federation Council of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation. So, in early February 2010, the new website of S.M. Mironov began its work. https://mironov.ru / , and his audience of "friends" (subscribers) on the LiveJournal platform has reached, according to his own estimates, 2 thousand users ^[17].

On the contrary, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation in its 2011 campaign did not focus on promoting G.A. Zyuganov as a political leader, but was characterized by an emphasis on negativity towards opposing political leaders, V.V. Putin and D.A. Medvedev. As noted by A.V. Toshcheva, videos of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation with references to the film "Titanic" that spread on social networks played a significant role in the dynamics of anti-rating of political figures criticized by the Communists ^{[20; 35]}.

United Russia itself, on the contrary, was based on a "mass" strategy of promoting political leaders on social networks. On the eve of the 2011 campaign, over 300 key United Russia deputies representing the party in the State Duma of the Russian Federation and regional parliaments simultaneously started maintaining accounts on the VKontakte social network, which set a unique precedent for political practice at that time.

From a functional point of view, an unusual feature of the activities of political leaders in social networks was its emphasized interactivity. Each visitor to the page on the social network could leave a comment with feedback or a question that was answered by the page owner's staff, or by himself.

In the run-up to the 2012 presidential elections, there was another round of activity by political leaders of the Russian Federation on social media. First of all, the attention of analysts, citizens and the professional community was focused on the campaign of candidate V.V. Putin, who was nominated for the post of President of the Russian Federation as an independent candidate: "A strong unifying factor for many social networks spread with different densities throughout Russia, whose members had not previously interpersonally interacted due to geographical remoteness and The differentiation of their activities has become a common psychological motivation for their members when choosing a candidate. (...) In social networks, as noted earlier, a broad dialogue has been established between Vladimir Putin and the network participants, and inter-network communications are active, which does not prevent the social network from having a vertical structure. The entire process of communication on the social network is strictly regulated, has clear rules, where trust in the personality of Vladimir Putin and his authority are at the head of everything" ^[5].

As with the accounts of deputies at various levels, Vladimir Putin's promotion as a political leader has relied on decentralization – many formally unofficial communities dedicated to the candidate, his program, political views, his image, and the facts of his biography have been created on the VKontakte social network. As opposed to "centralized" strategies built around one or a few communities, pages, channels, such actions ensured a faster increase in the recognition of the politician in different social groups.

The strategy of the Communist Party leader, G.A. Zyuganov, also largely referred to the party's activities in the last Duma elections. Again, a bet was made on videos with harsh criticism of United Russia, V.V. Putin, D.A. Medvedev ^[9]. Those responsible for promoting the image of the Communist Party leader on the Internet paid great attention to the distribution of videos of his debates with V.V. Zhirinovsky and S.M. Mironov. All of G.A. Zyuganov's materials were designed in the "corporate" colors of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation.

On the contrary, M.D. Prokhorov's election campaign on social media was much more active than the campaign of his Right Cause party carried out a few months earlier. The candidate roughly divided the resources invested in promoting the "old" and "new" media in half. Prokhorov's communication tools were presented on LiveJournal, Twitter, Facebook, VKontakte, as well as on YouTube video hosting. An important role in the social media campaign was played by the image of an entrepreneur who was alien to professional politics, a future reformist, and an ambitious manager who was close, however, to both business and creative circles. Like G.A. Zyuganov, M.D. Prokhorov used the motive of "detuning" from V.V. Putin and his program in his promotion on social networks, criticizing the latter.

Comparing the popularity of the microblogging service On the Twitter account of the two political figures active on this platform in the election campaigns under consideration, M.D. Prokhorov and S.M. Mironov (a sample of 100 random publications, December 2011 – January 2012), it can be concluded that the popularity of the former was higher in terms of measurable targeted actions – comments, "re-tweets", and the number of "like" marks was approximately comparable.

Summing up this research, it is advisable to note that in the election campaigns of 2011-2012, political forces for a number of reasons (ideological, infrastructural, technological), for the first time, were able to use the means of promotion in social networks to the fullest. In both major campaigns – for the parliamentary and presidential elections in the Russian Federation – the parties and candidate headquarters used various promotion strategies – "positive decentralized" (the campaign of United Russia and V.V. Putin) and "negative centralized" (the campaigns of the Communist Party and G.A. Zyuganov). At the same time, the greatest diversity in the technical means of campaigning on social networks and the Internet as such was inherent in the campaigns of S.M. Mironov and the Just Russia party.