Digital Image and Socio-Political Activities of the Russian Governors in the Context of a Special Military Operation

In the context of active digitalization and mediatization of the social and political life of society, digital communications between citizens and government representatives, primarily using social media, are becoming increasingly important. The digital image, as well as its positioning, are becoming not a secondary activity of a political actor, but the main one, since the information they broadcast, including socio-political information, directly affects citizens’ perception of the reality. Today, the online space is becoming the primary platform for the functioning, positioning and assessment of the perception of political actors by citizens - online users, since the Internet space is recognized as a social institution endowed with all institutional features and meanings. The purpose of this article is to study the image and socio-political activities of Russian governors who are forced to act in new crisis realities; to study the processes of transformation of the digital image of these heads of regions; in assessing the effectiveness of information coverage of the socio-political activities of governors in the digital space in the conditions of their own. The study was conducted using the following methods: content analysis, visual analysis and linguodiscursive analysis. The empirical base is the open data of eight telegram channels belonging to Russian governors in the period 2023: “Nastoyashchij Gladkov”, “AV BogomaZ”, “Gusev”, “Veniamin Kondratiev”, “Roman Starovoit (emoji of the flag of the Russian Federation)”, “Aksenov Z 82”, “Vasily Golubev”, “Razvozhaev”, including a corpus of texts, video and photographic materials, as well as all comments and “reactions” contained in these accounts for the period June 2023. The main results of the study are to describe the digital image system of governors facing crisis situations, to identify areas of socio-political activity that they continue to develop, despite the prevailing conditions. The described research methodology made it possible to identify how the governors of Russian regions in non-standard geopolitical conditions construct their digital image, which socio-political topics they raise, how they interact with citizens and design information coverage of their activities in social media.