Conclusions

Probably, there are many more ways to bypass the restriction of access for the banned resources.

Obviously, this process requires regular (daily) monitoring, detection of materials on anti-Ukrainian resources prohibited on the territory of Ukraine, exploring and appliance of the restriction tools, development and providing solutions to the authorities to impose restrictive measures (sanctions), and informing foreign partners.

Conclusions

1. An analysis of the most active sources in all the posts selected in August 2020 demonstrated the key role of information operations to discredit the West in the eyes of the Russian-speaking community and Ukraine in the eyes of the international partners to counter International (Western) assistance to Ukraine.

2. The process of manual research of the content of selected posts (over 98 thousand) takes too much time and human resources (only 5% were studied) (Annex 18).

3. Analysis of 5% of the posts proved that manual processing of top-ranked sources allows to identify the key messages created for information influence.

4. More effective and efficient research of large volume of information requires further automatization of the process. At this stage, the team used the system called “Sirius”, which provides a three-level systematization of information: by category of information (politics, economics, science, etc.), by topic of the day (most popular topics and messages per day), by trending events of the day (the most vital messages). In the future, algorithms for using artificial intelligence should be utilized to solve this problem.

5. The method of processing all the content on specific resources used in the Second stage enabled identifying new narratives that were not covered by the posts selected in the First stage.

6. Among the resources selected for analysis, there are those that openly distribute anti-Ukrainian content, but at the same time are not banned by the state authorities of Ukraine.

7. Identified schemes to bypass the ban on the distribution of destructive materials in Ukraine require constant monitoring, content analysis (including legal) and informing the responsible state institutions.