Abstract: Digital methods of political discourse research make it possible to expand the range of data on the statistics and replication of references to a particular issue in media space, the popularity of lexical units or other content disseminated both through the media and among the readership through comments and posts on personal accounts, and, as a result, to determine the specifics of the representation of certain political processes in mass media. The object of this study is various methods and tools of digital study of political media discourse, as well as relevant software. The subject is the results of content analysis of political communication obtained by foreign (J.-M. Eberle, P. Tolochko, P. Jost, T. Heidenreich, H.G. Boomgaarden) and Russian (E.I. Beglova and O.Y. Shmeleva) specialists. The aim of the paper is to identify the most effective way of working with media material by comparative study of manual and automated methods of content analysis. The main method of research in the article was a comprehensive comparative analysis of the conducted studies: from manual content analysis to digital content analysis with the use of mathematical algorithms and the method of ‘digital footprint’, theoretical analysis of scientific literature on the identified problems, descriptive and comparative methods, interpretation of the obtained results. The scientific novelty of the article consists in the comparison of different digital methods of content analysis. The identification of their strengths and weaknesses and the prospects for the application of digital methods of content analysis in the media industry in Russian science are poorly studied and need to be developed. New digital methods of content analysis are more objective, operational, structured, diverse and verifiable, unlike manual ones;the rapid development of artificial intelligence technologies makes its own adjustments to the methodology of analyzing political media discourse.