Russian Salafi Online Communities: Textual and Visual Aspects of Discourse and Broadcast Media Images

Despite the success in countering the online propaganda of terrorist organizations, such as ISIS, and a sharp decrease in the number of materials related to it in Russian social networks, Salafitization of the media space of Russian social networks remains at a high level. Many radical virtual communities that have retained their presence on social networks have managed to adapt to the strict rules of censorship and broadcast their ideological guidelines and communicative messages in a veiled form. An adequate assessment of current trends in the circulation of Salafi discourse online requires regular monitoring of social networks and the identification of new forms of representation of Salafi ideology. The article presents the results of a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the ideological discourse circulating in ten communities identified as Salafi in the VKontakte social network. The aim of the study is to thematize the textual content and media images that are produced and broadcast by the administrators of virtual communities, and to determine the reaction of the online audience to the published media materials. At the first stage of the study, a database of more than 2.5 thousand posts was created. These posts were retrieved with related statistical information using the API service of VKontakte. The posts were divided according to the relevance of the online audience (the main criterion is the number of likes) into three categories: low, medium, and high significance. A content analysis of posts of the three categories and a multimodal analysis of visual images (media images), the most popular and typical for the studied Salafi communities, were carried out. The main results of the study are as follows. It was found that, in the ratio of the segments of the various currents of Salafism (moderate, radical, and ultra-radical), a moderate form of Salafism plays a rather large role. Of the total number of subscribers of all communities, moderate Salafi groups cover 38% of the online audience. At the same time, regardless of the degree of radicalism of the broadcast discourse, the online audience sympathetic to the Salafi ideology is most interested in topics that are neutral in emotional tone and meaning. Posts with radical content do not rise above the segment of posts of low importance. The preferred type of images that accompany textual materials are neutral visual images, namely images (photographs) of nature. An analysis of the semantics of media images shows a shift in emphasis in the ideological discourse of Salafism from group mobilization to the intensification of individual religiosity.

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