Political Memes in Russian Politics

The next speaker in this session at the iCS Symposium is Vasilii Fedorov, whose focus is on the Russian social media platform VKontakte, which enables users to deconstruct official government communication in creative, visual ways. Such activity is especially strong during election campaigns.

This study focusses especially on the content produced by the Website Lentach, whose leading stylistic device is irony; it generates visual and ironic memes in the form of comics, official images superimposed with ironic subtitles, and other content that criticises or makes fun of the government. This is especially crucial for independent media, who also use such activity to demonstrate civic engagement.