Comparative Semantic Network Analysis of the Satanic Discourses in the Russian Social Network "Vkontakte"

Satanism definition has been a significant issue for the various social actors through ages. Satanic moral panic could be treated as one of the examples for the social struggles on the power to name something satanic or not. For contemporary Russian society the satanism definition also became relevant, Russian politicians, lawmakers frequently use the word “satanism” in their claims and have to make decisions on what should be named satanic. Due to the significance of satanism definition for the scholar and non-scholar public, in this thesis, I dealt with the development of the application of sociological classifications to the distinction between satanic discourses. In particular, I attempted to compare three types of satanic online discourses (using definition of satanism proposed by Petersen) and discover the distinctive features of the satanic discourses in Russian social network “VK” on the semantic level. For that purpose, semantic network analysis was used, in addition to this, the social network analysis was applied to the reconstruction of the structure of the satanic discursive field. The results of my Thesis contribute to the satanism research, discourse analysis studies of online discourse propagation, digital religion research, social network analysis studies and could be utilized as a first step towards the formation of the mechanisms for the automatic distinction between satanic discourses in the Russian social networks.