Manual mouse control

The Kremlin is looking for a digital ersatz of democracy

From 2019, the Kremlin intends to monitor the situation in the regions in a new way. The current sentiment monitoring system in the country is based mainly on materials from the local press. But it is becoming more and more difficult for the federal center to extract useful information from it. The media are controlled by the governors, so the picture is unctuous. The fact that the front page of the local newspaper always has reports of new successes and a portrait of the provincial chief is not at all interested in the Kremlin, but they can do nothing about it either. Therefore, "Incident Management" is invented.

A program with this name was developed by Medialogy and is now being implemented in practice. It allows you to automatically monitor five social networks - VKontakte, Odnoklassniki, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram - for certain keywords.

The innovation in this case is not just to analyze the situation, but to get the local authorities to react.

The monitoring results are sent to the regional administrator of the system, who decides which cases need attention from the relevant departments, regional ministries or municipalities. As part of the “Management Incident”, representatives of regional authorities will have to respond to complaints in social networks, a copy of the response is sent to the program administrator. If several posts appear on the same topic in different accounts, they are combined by the program into one “incident”, and the response of the authorities is sent to the authors of the posts automatically, regardless of the social network.

RBC reports that statistics will be kept on all "incidents", which are available to both local authorities and the presidential administration. At the same time, strict deadlines are set for regional officials: all “incidents” must be worked out within a day. The project is supervised directly by Sergey Kiriyenko, a big fan of improving efficiency and quantitative indicators.

Similar information monitoring systems already existed on the market and were developed mainly by the same Medialogia, but in this case it is important how the Kremlin integrates local authorities into the new digital reporting. “The proximity of power to the people” will need to be demonstrated directly on social networks. Now it will no longer be possible to write just like that in a blog about another violation of the rights of citizens: a government robot will definitely “come” and inform you that your appeal has been registered and is being considered by the relevant department.

Clearly, The Incident has a dual purpose. On the one hand, this is an attempt to minimize "politicization" in the regions. Some unpleasant event occurs, people write about it on the Internet, demand local authorities to intervene; and in this situation, a robot from the presidential administration appears and introduces the dissatisfied with the necessary officials, allowing the latter to offer a formal reply. There have been many reasons for "politicization" lately: from landfills in the Moscow region to the "Winter Cherry" in Kemerovo. It can be seen that the authorities are seriously concerned about the uncontrolled mobilization of citizens in such cases. The other side of the issue is no longer stopping protests at the start, but centralized control over the activities of regional authorities. Although most of the "incidents" will be processed on the spot, the system provides for the figure of a federal censor, who at any moment sees how much bad news there is in the region and how the governors are coping with this problem.

In other words, we have before us the digitalization of the manual control of the country in a permanent state of emergency, the re-equipment of this practice with the latest technology. The need for “Incident Management” is due, on the one hand, to the horror experienced by the authorities in front of their own citizens, and on the other hand, to the total distrust that is common in society (the Kremlin does not trust reports from the field, the people do not trust governors, etc.). Other countries are coping with similar problems without the latest digital tools, because by the 19th century the alternative was well known: local government, federalism and democracy. It will not be possible to replace this triad with a modern monitoring system, but at least the authorities will not live so scary.

Medialogy confirmed the information about the creation of such a system, specifying two details. First, the monitoring system was originally developed for commercial companies interested in collecting information about their brands and customer reactions to products and services. The Kremlin order is thus a version of marketing adapted to the current management model. Secondly, and more importantly, the Medialogy representative clarified that not only complaints, but also other important topics will be monitored: “questions, feedback, thanks”.

Apparently, the story of the president's administration reading gubernatorial panegyrics to themselves will repeat itself, but at a new technological level.

Now the authors of thanks to the regional authorities will no longer be lured journalists, but “ordinary citizens” and “bloggers”. Each governor, accordingly, will need his own factory of Internet trolls, ready to load Incident Management with the right topics.

The state pumps a lot of money into the creation of a digital Potemkin village. What can you do if you are scared to death of democracy.