Affordanсes and the Epistemic Motivation for Communication on Digital Platforms

Modern political communication is no longer limited to the traditional exchange of political information between people, it is moderated by very sophisticated methods on digital platforms, which opens up almost limitless possibilities for the hidden manipulation of public consciousness. The formation of political judgments in the Internet space is based on the dominance of a selective communication strategy, which determines the direction of the processes of motivated cognition. In this respect, communication processes in the virtual world are not processes of the formation of public reason, but often turn into outsourcing of political judgments, when the task of forming coordinated judgments and decisions is transferred to a limited number of agents, including specialists of modern Internet propaganda or technological mechanisms of directed control over communication. Even if we agree with the concept of choosing a metaposition in post-truth conditions, when everyone is able to evaluate the truth, nevertheless, in the absence of expert authoritarianism, the platforms take upon themselves the fulfillment of the orientational task. In this regard, one of the mechanisms of influence on communication processes is the system of platform affordances that transform the epistemic motivation of the participants in communication. Using A. Kruglanski concept of motivated cognition, the paper analyzes the influence of affordances on it, which greatly contributes to the transformation of communication judgments. Affordances change the ratio of informational and deliberative practices, subordinating deliberation, on the one hand, to the directed motivation for post-true conflict interaction, on the other hand, creating a space for post-true knowledge with an unbalanced structure of possible consent. The empirical basis of the research is the platforms "Our St. Petersburg".