The Russian Presidential Administration not only monitors the social activity of all social networks, but also wants to know how effective election campaigns are in online media, as a rule, and how social networks work.
Russians seem to be interested in what the younger generation is asking for these days, due to the rapidly changing political environment.
Nezavisimaya Gazeta reports that there are two companies that will conduct the research, and both will work to analyze the government's restrictions on the Internet, particularly those that have been introduced recently, such as forcing popular bloggers to cooperate with the authorities, or forcing social networks to install spyware and software to help the intelligence service.
It seems that the whole idea for this study came after a blogger known for his anti-corruption stance, Aleksey Navalny, won 35% of the vote for the Moscow mayoral seat. While he didn’t exactly succeed, the number of voters in his favor helped open the eyes of the government, which noticed that it might need to embrace some new political strategies, including online ones.
The younger generation, according to previous studies, trusts the Internet more than the mass media or official press releases.
