However, the opponents of Ukraine are not interested in any explanations. The notorious Fox News journalist Tucker Carlson, referring to the mentioned interviews of Zelensky, concluded that the "main defender of democracy in the world" decided to "abolish democracy in Ukraine." Carlson's disinformation narrative about the “Zelensky dictatorship” and “cancellation of elections” was quickly picked up by other American figures, including US House of Representatives member Marjorie Taylor Green and a journalist Glen Greenwald. Civil Network OPORA investigated who else had joined the discreditation campaign in the American segment of Twitter and Facebook, and what key disinformation narratives about the Ukrainian elections are spreading in these social networks.

After  the beginning of a full-scale Russian invasion, Meta hid information about Ukrainian advertisers in the Facebook Political Ads Library. Although the rules for posting ads have not changed, Ukrainians get to see increasingly more Russian propaganda and posts with fraudulent content in their feeds.

The Facebook page of the Spanish-language Russia Today has more followers than the main page of the RT ⁠“media”. Spanish is the second language in the world by the number of speakers (according to some sources, it’s the third). It has official status in 20 countries all over the world, and about 463 million people use it as their first language. For example, even in the United States, almost 42 million people speak Spanish at home, which is 13% of the total population. In social networks, inc...

Why Meta should pay attention to the pages of russian diplomatic institutions.

According to research conducted by the KIIS and commissioned by the Civil Network OPORA on media consumption of Ukrainians during the war, Telegram first became the most popular social network for news consumption in Ukraine. Thus, 76% of Ukrainians receive news from social networks, and 66% of them prefer this messenger, although Facebook has occupied a prominent place since 2015. In general, this mobile application is the third most popular among Ukrainians and gives way to only two gas sta...

The changes in the media consumption of Ukrainians showed another interesting trend: in the answer to the question about what social networks respondents use to consume news, some respondents indicated the "Molnia". They might have been referring to the Viber channel with more than 4 million subscribers, as of June 2022, which makes it the largest news channel in messengers in Ukraine. We decided to understand how this channel has gained such a great popularity among Ukrainians and whether it...

If after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by the russian federation you are still subscribed to some russian "stars" on Instagram, then you must have noticed that it is not so easy to view photos and stories of Ksenia Sobchak or Nikolai Baskov.

Even before the full-scale russian invasion, Civil Network OPORA was working on exposing anti-Ukrainian Facebook pages, investigating the activities of pro-Russian politicians in social media, and identifying the objectives of the network of pages that promoted russian propaganda in Ukraine. In this piece, analysts share their experience of searching for such media, as illustrated by russian media sites and pages, which OPORA started collecting in February, 2022. Over the month since then, so...

Today, anyone in the world can see the events in Bucha through the lenses of Ukrainian TV channels. However, Russia still tries to attract as many as possible social media users from different countries. In this publication, we will have a look at how the Russian propaganda machine attempts to influence foreign citizens.