Оfficial digital political agenda of political opinion leaders: major intersections of political discourse and youth preferences

The authors examine the official digital political agenda in terms of young people’s perception of the political discourse broadcast by political actors in the online space. Social media contribute to the formation of a new political agenda involving users and political actors. This facilitates the integration of a political subject into the information and news flow, as well as to become a leader of socio-political opinion. The empirical base of the research was the content of the official accounts of D.A. Medvedev, S.S. Sobyanin and S.K. Shoigu (the method of linguistic and discourse analysis of publications, hashtags, photos, videos and feedback in the form of comments and reposts), which constitute the political content of the social platform “VKontakte” and messenger “Telegram” according to the rating of Medialogy for the period from June 1 to June 30, 2023. The empirical base also includes the results of the author’s projective methodology focused on studying of young people’s perception of the digital political agenda. As a result of the study, the author comes to the conclusion that users perceive the digital political agenda in the online space in a non-linear way, reacting to visual and textual patterns, but not reproducing a holistic political picture, which is represented by a political subject in their social media.