ИСТИНА

In this presentation, we discuss the role that social media in general and TikTok in particular played in recent political events in Russia. The mobilizing force of social media has been previously studied by scholars both in regard to the global (Fenton, 2016; Pickard, & Berman, 2020) and Russian (Bodrunova, & Litvinenko, 2013) context, in the latter case discussions have been to a large extent framed by the counter-sphere theory and its formation in the new Russian reality. Scholars also recently explored the earlier use of populism in cultural studies as a critical term for apolitical/celebratory modes of analysis, and then argued it may be usefully extended today to refer to popular and political efforts to construct a ‘people’ in overtly cultural terms (Moran, & Littler, 2020). Acknowledging previous studies in this field, we move on to discussing the potential of social media to connect, contest and organize people using recent protest movements in Russia early 2021, when Russian TikTok users were posting videos calling for protests in support of Alexei Navalny. We argue here that an important role in these processes belongs to media literacy and media education, adding up to critical thinking of people and to a significant extent forming it. The lack of media and information literacy can lead to false interpretations of the events, the spread of fake news and even manipulation of the public opinion, which gets particularly important in case of young Internet users. Our presentation therefore aims at both raising questions about populism as a new – and at the same time already well-known – phenomenon in the Russian political and cultural context, and the role of social media in the recent political events in the country.