Moscow districts’ social media communities: content and its moderation

Abstract

The paper is based on the results of an empirical study of media communities (public pages and online groups) of Moscow districts. The study aims at describing the community moderators’ practices as well as formal and substantive features of the online publications. Non-standardized (in-depth) interviews and content analysis method are used in the study.One of specific features of Moscow districts’ public pages and communities is that they were created due to the increased demand of a group of city inhabitants for the implementation of social projects and the principle of their «right to the city» and also in the absence of official online activities of the local administration resulted from a low level of adaptability of municipalities to innovative communication practices.In this situation, the representatives of authorities prefer to stay incognito in the established communities; they use intermediaries specializing in modern communication technologies and pretending to be media activists and consider this communicative strategy to be more effective so far. The authors describe the main tasks the online communities’ moderators have to tackle as well as topics and other features of the published content.