Матеріали автора Yuliia Dukach

“Hahahaha. That lady is just a stupid chicken!” — such comments aren’t uncommon under YouTube videos of various media outlets in Ukraine. Aggression, harassment, sexism, and threats against journalists are all examples of gender-based violence online. Although YouTube has strict policies against hate speech, its moderation algorithms often miss it, removing hundreds of thousands pieces of content but leaving “just a stupid chicken” under videos from Ukrainian media. This may be due to the imperfection of the algorithms themselves or problems with “understanding” the Ukrainian language.

"At least I'm getting some exercise again," I joke whenever someone asks, "How are you?" "I live on the 20th floor." "Oh, I sympathize," is the usual reply. Sometimes I hear, "I get it. I’m on the 22nd." In that moment, the social distance between us seems to shrink significantly.Читати українськоюWe analyzed data from the summer blackouts in Kyiv, and a similar situation may soon happen again.

We have trained a large language model to detect the most common manipulation techniques in Telegram channel posts.Читати українською

So far, only fraudsters, propagandists, and comedians have benefited the most from the technology of deepfakes. And while the first two categories seem to be clear, the latter reminds us once again that even a low-quality, obviously fake diplomat still finds those who take it seriously. This means that fraudsters and propagandists are doing quite well.We have downloaded more than 10 thousand comments to four popular TikTok videos on a channel that makes primitive comic videos about politicians "on the front lines" using the technology of deepfakes. All this is to try to understand what share of commenters took these videos at face value. And the results are not very encouraging.Читати українською

At the end of July, the TikTok Creative Center website (an analytical dashboard with the latest trends on the platform) showed the most popular hashtags in Ukraine and the number of views each has received. These statistics revealed that the network of artificial Russian bots had amassed 10 million views in just one week, indicating significant success. However, six months later, the view statistics vanished from the platform without a trace, suspiciously coinciding with the moment TikTok became aware of our investigation We know for sure that government agencies used the social network to block the bot farm after our article was published.Читати українською

In late May, Tiktok announced that in the first months of 2024, it had disrupted 15 influence operations on the platform and deleted 3,001 related accounts. We were able to find more than 2,000 accounts that were created as part of a single Russian information operation revolving around the hashtag #it'snotmyukraine and aimed at discrediting the mobilization in Ukraine and the actions of the Recruiting office.Читати українською

In June alone, the video with the hashtag #Recruiting office received 470 million views in Ukrainian TikTok (3 billion all-time). At the same time, 13 thousand posts with this hashtag were published within a month (62 thousand all-time). This is the first most popular hashtag in the News and Entertainment category. It is increasingly being used on the TikTokers pages, which seem to have nothing to do with the topic of the Recruiting office and mobilization. That's because this topic gets many more views.We decided to look at how and whom TikTok encourages to make videos about Recruiting office. To do this, we uploaded the latest posts by TikTokers whose videos appeared in the search results using the hashtag #Recruiting office. Along with the reach, we analyzed how many Russians are following this topic.Читати українською

"...Could Zelenskyy have ordered the Armed Forces of Ukraine to strike a children's hospital during a Russian missile attack to get more air defense systems and aircraft?" rhetorically asks a Russian propagandist on Telegram. He immediately answers himself: "Zelenskyy showed with Bucha that he is ready for any crimes against humanity..." While the ruins were still smoking, Russian propaganda launched a wide and clearly pre-planned information campaign. It consisted of the usual elements for such cases, but there was also something new: a wave of posts claiming that peace negotiations with Russia are necessary.Читати українською

On May 23, TikTok announced an update to its policy against targeted influence campaigns: from now on, all channels labeled as “state-controlled media” will not appear in recommended videos outside their country of origin. Thus, Spanish-speaking RT will not appear in the recommendation feed for the Spanish-speaking audience, and Sputnik Brasil will not appear for the Brazilian audience. But does this restriction work effectively? We decided to check the data.Читати українською

With the development of artificial intelligence capabilities, social networks are increasingly looking like an "AI dump" - a place where lazy content creators test the power of algorithms and try to go viral with other people's and synthetically processed content. We uncovered one such TikTok farm of 300 channels that, after automated processing, presented YouTube content as their own. At the same time, they were "accidentally" spreading Russian propaganda.Читати українською