Regional practice of legal regulation of the use of social networks in public administration
This article provides the results of analysis of legal acts of the authorities of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation that regulate administrative activity involving the use of social networks. It is noted that such type of interaction between public authorities, citizens and organizations is gaining widespread. The need for using social networks and instant messengers by public authorities has increased in 2020–2021, since the traditional “face-to-face” communication was suspended due to the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic. The acquired results indicate a significant increase in the instances of regulation of the use of social networks (from 184 mentions in 2011 to 3125 in 2020). It is noted that the use of social networks in administrative activity is regulated by the two groups of legal acts: 1) the acts adopted specifically for regulation of the use of social networks; 2) the acts that regulate other types of relations, but containing separate norms on the use of social networks. At the same time, in the practice of legal regulation, the first group of acts is divided into two types:: acts that establish the procedure for creating and maintaining accounts (webpages) of public authorities in social networks; and acts that establish the procedure for maintaining communication (appeals, publications in social networks) that require a response. The author summarizes the structure of the corresponding legal acts, which provides grounds for their further research.