The Forming of Political Image on Instagram

As more political institutions’ representatives actively engage in political media discourse, the image of politicians becomes an important topic in the scientific field. The central goal of this paper is to point out how exactly the image of Russian politicians was being formed on Instagram through time and to parse the distinctions between the aims of Instagram usage by the politicians of different social status. To achieve this goal, the author explored the theoretical aspects of political image and the role of the Internet in political communications, as well as Instagram as a tool of political image forming, and examined the accounts of federal, regional and municipal politicians using content and comparative analysis. The revealed patterns were used for conducting interviews that helped evaluate how accurate the hypotheses about every level of authority were. The author found out that federal politicians are almost the same as regular Instagram users, regional politicians tend to use both formal and informal types of content to attract audiences and municipal politicians are the most active of all and tend to give feedback on issues of great importance on their pages.