The rapid development of information technologies changes the global communication landscape. If two decades ago the main tools for shaping the information agenda were the mass media, today the dominant position in the global information and communication market belongs to social media and messengers. They have become not only the main sources of information, but also extremely effective means of communication between people, which has opened wide opportunities for psychological impact targeted at specific groups of the population and aimed at the spread of the desired narratives in their minds. The purpose of this article is to analyze, through the prism of “strategic communication” concept, communication strategies and specific communication channels employed to create the necessary psychological effect aimed on the destabilization of the society. It is underscored that no technology can fully protect citizens from the spread of toxic content. Thus, in Russia, blocking Western social media only partially solves the problem, since the main means of communication are messengers, and a blocked web-site, Telegram channel, or “VKontakte”(VK) group can be quickly replaced by a dozen of new ones. Against this background, it is concluded that the most effective long-term strategy to counter destructive content spread through social media continues to be ensuring the support of the ruling government’s policy by the population. This finding is illustrated using the Russia case by combining political discourse analysis and machine learning methods (such as topic modelling) to identify stable narratives on the basis of a large amount of empirical data from VK communities.
Konstantin Pantserev (Wed,) studied this question.