Prolonged Political Protests in Russia and the Republic of Belarus in Summer-Autumn 2020: Reference of the Russian Social Media Audience

The article presents the results of applied political research. Its purpose is the determination of the scale and nature of the impact of social and media representation of prolonged political protests in the Russian Federation and in the Republic of Belarus in the summer-autumn of 2020 on the Russian national Internet audience, namely, its reference to the crisis events related to the processes of delegitimisation in the Khabarovsk territory and the member state of the Union State. The cybermetric analysis of information flows in social media implemented in the study made it possible to identify gender, age, media location, and geolocation features of the cases’ online representation under consideration. By applying the case-study method, we identified common features, connections and dependencies, and differences between prolonged political protests in the Khabarovsk territory of the Russian Federation and the Republic of Belarus. The event analysis carried out in the course of the study made it possible to record the key growth peaks in user activity dynamics around the protests. On this basis, it was possible to identify triggers that increased the intensity of protests and increased interest to them on social media. Among them, we can distinguish the following: elections, unpopular political decisions, violence by law enforcement agencies, victimhood, participation in protests by women and pensioners.

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