Messaging service Telegram’s marketing strategy is to present itself as a platform for total freedom of speech in response to the moderation policies of other platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. Telegram professes to consider content moderation as a philosophical question of ethics and morale, as if any interference has the exclusive function of “disciplining” users. However, this philosophical issue has quite tangible consequences in practice. For example, the findings of an independent impact assessment of Facebook on human rights in Myanmar showed(opens in a new tab) that under-moderation of content in Myanmar language contributed(opens in a new tab) to the act of genocide against the Rohingya Muslims.

This autumn, Russians plan to hold the so-called “elections” for 79 municipal associations and “legislative bodies” (occupation administrations) in parts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia Oblasts, and also the “by-elections” to the “state duma” in the occupied Crimea.

Russia plans to hold so-called “elections” to the “legislative bodies” (in other words, occupation governments) in the occupied areas of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts as well as in 79 municipal districts this coming fall.

Almost fully destroyed by the Russians, Mariupol has been under occupation for a year. The Ukrainian information space receives little reports about the life of its inhabitants and the functioning of the infrastructure. However, we can see that Russia is trying to paint a picture of the “reconstruction” in the city. On the bones.

Whereas by February 2022, new pro-Russian channels had been appearing sporadically, such as several channels per month, after February 2022 they appeared almost daily, often more than one per day. In order to evaluate the content shared by the occupation Telegram resources, we randomly selected 100 channels and overviewed their content. It can be divided into the following thematic blocks.

Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, restrictions have intensified. Now the Russian Federation is blocking everything they are not able to control. Since the summer of 2022, there has been no free access to radio and television in the temporarily occupied territories (TOTs), neither to most Ukrainian and international websites nor even popular social networks. As a result, residents are cut off from impartial news and fall under the crushing influence of Russian propaganda. Civil N...

In this report, OPORA described in detail the measures undertaken by Russia to restrict access to the Ukrainian information field in the temporarily occupied territories, as well as the scale and dynamics of the development of an alternative media infrastructure for the information service provision for the needs of the occupation in the social network Vkontakte and in Telegram messenger. We analyzed the content of the occupers’ pages and channels, and classified them by content type. Data co...