THE PROBLEM OF EVALUATING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF POLITICAL COMMUNICATIONS IN SOCIAL MEDIA

Abstract

The article deals with the problems of analyzing political communications in social media carried out in conditions of global instability and a sharp increase in international and interregional confrontation caused, in addition to political reasons, by competition for dwindling resources. In such conditions, manipulative technologies are spreading extremely dynamically and the value foundations of politics are being lost. The key characteristics of network communication are: anonymity, non-normativity and non-linearity, which greatly complicates the conduct of such an analysis. An even more difficult research task is to evaluate the effectiveness of this kind of communication. Analyzing the complexity of conceptualization and operationalization of the effectiveness of political communication, the author suggests using the term «communicative effectiveness», the methodological prerequisites of which are the theory of agreements presented in the works of modern French neo-institutionalists: L. Boltyansky, L. Theveno, O. Favoro, etc. Having illustrated his analysis with several cases of network political communication in recent years, the author comes to the conclusion that it is necessary to assign the category of «trust» to the central criteria for evaluating the effectiveness of political communication.

Keywords:

political communication, social media, communicative efficiency, transactional costs, targeting, manipulation, cyber simulation