Value-based political trigger in the Russian media sphere (the case of the 2021 State Duma elections)

The study of the value-based political discourse of social media is structured by analyzing online commentaries. The concepts of “value-based political trigger”, “sacred discourse” and “profane discourse” are operationalized. The empirical material is represented by comments on “Komsomolskaya Pravda’s” online media articles in the social media website “VKontakte”. Altogether, 7 posts in the online media community and 451 comments were analyzed.Trigger analysis as a specific form of content analysis and a method of evaluative analysis were used to compare and assess the values that Internet users respond to when commenting on the 2021 State Duma election records. Methods of formation and reproduction of political values discourses are outlined, and inferred consecutive value associations are described; both of which can be viewed as trigger responses. In conclusion, it is pointed out that the Internet media discourse is dominated by the so-called “sacred discourse”, although of the dichotomy “sacred -profane” is approximated, due to the possible trolling and activity of bots in the online community of users. The importance of conducting trigger analysis in conjunction with critical discourse analysis is underlined.