Parma R.V.

The article presents the results of an applied political research devoted to the implementation of the manipulative effect of search engines (SEME) during the election campaign in 2021 in Russia. SEME is a technology for influencing a wide audience, aimed at transforming behavioral effects and shaping public opinion through changes in the issuance of digital search engines. The order of issue, as well as the tone of the results, can significantly influence the attitude of undecided users and their subsequent electoral choice. According to the results of the study, a number of manipulations in the nature of search results were recorded, associated with an increase in negative coverage of the electoral process, election results and the state of the party system, achieved through the active dissemination of materials from foreign information resources.

The article discusses digital technologies of external destructive information and psychological influence on the constituent entities of the Russian Federation bordering Ukraine: Belgorod, Bryansk, Zaporozhye, Kursk and Kherson regions, Donetsk People’s Republic, and Lugansk People’s Republic. The authors used cognitive mapping to study an array of publications of relevant content in relevant Telegram channels. As a result, key digital ways of achieving external destructive information and psychological influence have been identified, which are technological methods of information propaganda and manipulation of public consciousness. Propaganda most often uses the techniques of demonization and stigmatization, and manipulation uses negativization, primitivization, tendentious selection of information and parasitism. At the same time, most often in information materials of a deconsolidating nature, which provoke ethnic and socio-economic splits, the manipulative technique of primitivization is used.

The concept of ‘consent engineering’ developed by social psychologist and technologist Edward Bernays in the first half of the 20th century, has become a cornerstone of modern public relations, political communication, and social governance. This article deconstructs the paradox of the Bernays’s model: how the desire for rational governance of people gave rise to manipulative technologies of mass influence on society as a whole. This article analyzes how Bernays’s classic ideas anticipated the era of modern post-truth and digital algorithms, transforming the understanding of public policy democracy. The authors examine the emergence of a new version of consent engineering in the era of algorithmic power and other digital circuits This article also analyzes the transformation of consent-building methods — from classic mass communication tools to algorithmic platforms using big data and artificial intelligence.