Measuring Agenda Setting and Public Concern in Russian Social Media

摘要

Intensified contradictions between Russian state and private media have the serious consequences related to the fragmentation of the agenda. Each media pursues its own purposes in agenda setting which determine their strategies regarding the audience concern. Our hypotheses were that the private media would follow the interests of their audience in agenda-setting, and the state ones, on the contrary, would ignore them. To test out hypotheses we decided to measure the media and public agenda in social media because on these platforms there was the opportunity to study both of them. This paper presents the investigation of agenda-setting on the SNS Vkontakte of four popular news groups which represent following media: Russia Today, TASS, RBC and Meduza. We compared the topic coverage of mentioned media and the engagement rate for the news. We discovered that only RT's agenda correspond to the audience concern. In other news groups correlations were about zero. These results did not confirm our main hypotheses, but the analysis of the communication activity suggested that there was artificial activity which could affect the engagement rate. In addition, we revealed that the state media tend to cover the unobtrusive issues while the private ones - the obtrusive issues. The main methodological result of this paper is the demonstration how to replace the surveys by social media metrics in research of agenda-setting.