Conclusions

Conclusions

1. The main information operations in the field of countering Western aid are discrediting the West in the eyes of the Russian-speaking community and Ukraine in the eyes of the international community.

2. A wide range of topics of operations led to a large amount of information for analysis. More than 19 thousand posts were discovered on “VKontakte” within one month.

3. Manual content processing took most of the time of the First Phase. On the one hand, this method increases the accuracy of the narratives, on the other – enhances subjectivity in the evaluation of material and in defining keywords for its selection. This issue requires creation of a perfect automated content analysis system. Existing capabilities of the Sirius system should be utilized further, provided steady improvement in processing data obtained from social media. Another option is to reduce the number of resources (sources) for the selection of posts, in other words - the selection of the key ones (first distribution circuit). This approach was applied during the Second stage. The latter option is also due to the large amount of identical material (reposts) on different

resources.

4. The use of keywords in the narrow sense in search queries results in a higher percentage of correspondence of the posts selected by the Spectrum System to the topics of information operations.

However, subjective human factor causes a likelihood that the selected words and phrases do not embrace all narratives within the overarching “countering the international assistance” theme.

This causes the need for application of another search method (in the Second stage) and further addition of the artificial intelligence module to the architecture of the Spectrum System.

5. The analysis discovered that 3% of identified recourses distributed 33% of materials. These resources with a higher probability should be attributed to the basis of the grouping the aggres-

sor’s forces to conduct information operations.

6. This cluster includes about 80% of the groups and accounts that were identified as active in the previous phase of the research (keyword “Soros” ), and at the same time rated as the most active in the First stage (101 keywords / phrases).

7. The Project did not include the in-depth study of websites. However, superficial analysis of the social media groups associated with the website discovered organizational network of automatic distribution of destructive materials “Arch-ANO - People’s Liberation Army» ( ik.arhano.ru), which probably has branches in Ukraine (18 groups).