Quasi-political internet-meme as a way to represent the news agenda

Using the examples taken from the Internet community in the social network VKontakte (Political memes; https://vk.com/polityumor), the author analyzes Internet-memes in terms of their semantics and ability to represent not only the event itself, but also the subjects that discuss it. The paper compiles a list of political events that found their reflection in the memes. The author characterizes collected empirical material as quasi-political one due to two main factors: first, in addition to political topics, it includes events from other spheres, such as economics and culture; second, essentially non-political topics are exposed to politicization by representatives of the Internet community. In total, 253 examples of memes were identified that reflected the political news agenda of 2014-2017. The author divides the analyzed examples into types and topics, and the attitudes of the speakers belong to either side of the «liberal-conservative» dichotomy.