On March 9, Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko sat down with 18 people. Among them were no world leaders, corporate moguls or celebrities. And still, the two-hour gathering made more waves than many of Poroshenko’s meetings with the big shots.
The 18 guests were Ukrainian social media bloggers.
The very idea of an off-the-record meeting with bloggers isn’t strange. Each of the ones present at the meeting commands an audience of several thousand to tens of thousands of readers, making them similar to a one-person news publication. It also isn’t something new: Ukraine’s top officials have been conducting similar meetings before.
It was the content of this meeting and the choice of the attendees that was controversial.
All of the invited bloggers pose as independent voices, as regular people sharing their opinion on current events – but all of them have been notoriously pro-Poroshenko in their posts. In fact, their unanimous reactions, among other evidence, led many to believe that Poroshenko’s office is secretly conducting a far-reaching campaign on social media to swing public opinion in favor of the president.
Not only do some popular Ukrainian Facebook and Twitter bloggers unanimously support Poroshenko and defend him from accusations in suspiciously similar words but they are also backed by hundreds and hundreds of fake social media accounts, or bots.
Some 1,500 of such bots have been used to boost the support of Poroshenko’s official page, as a research by Vox Ukraine revealed. Every sixth comment on the president’s page is written by a bot.
Now the suspicion of Poroshenko’s office using supposedly “independent” bloggers to boost his image online is supported by the exclusive meeting that Poroshenko granted them.
While the meeting was off-the-record, most of the group shared their summaries of it. From these, we know that the president talked prospective business-related legislation that he supports – among it, the tax amnesty and replacing the corporate income tax with dividends tax, which is disproved by the International Monetary Fund because it might undermine tax revenue severely.
There was a different topic that Poroshenko reportedly raised that was, perhaps, more interesting. According to several of the attendees, the president spoke of the situation in the Ukrainian media. He is apparently worried that the media focuses on negative news and wanted to emphasize how important the positive coverage of affairs in Ukraine is.
One of the attendees, Viktor Tregubov, said that the conversation touched upon the “situation in the media that is borderline enemy propaganda.”
This is a worrying sign, because it is all too familiar. We saw it happen every now and then – the supporters of the government labeling critical media coverage “Kremlin propaganda,” and condemning the media for revealing the flaws of the Ukrainian rulers in the critical time when the country is at war.
We in the Kyiv Post, too, sometimes are labeled “too negative” or “too hard on the government” but we continue to believe that shining the light on the flaws is helping the country much more than omitting them. Some disagree.
But it is one thing to hear this from online commentators and quite a different one to know that not only does the president advocate this vision – but he also preaches it to a group of selected influencers.
It seems that Poroshenko and his office use online opinion influencers – and, presumably, online bots – as a weapon to counter the “negativity” of the traditional media. Under “negativity,” one must understand the reports that hurt the president himself – about the defense sector corruption, about Poroshenko resisting the creation of an anti-corruption court, or about selective justice.
This use of bloggers makes sense for Poroshenko.
Of course, the online audience isn’t as big and important as the TV one. But the TV audience is secured through agreements between Poroshenko and a handful of oligarchs that own the main networks. It is clear that the networks have a “no personal criticism” policy about Poroshenko. Political talk shows can target some of his allies – for example, Ihor Kolomoisky-owned 1+1 has been mercilessly trashing the National Bank Head Valeria Gontareva under whose rule Kolomoisky’s Privatbank was nationalized. But the president remains untouchable.
Online media, on the other hand, are harder to censor. Here, everyone can be a one-man news operation and target anyone. There are no oligarch owners to strike a deal with. So the president’s team has been going for a different approach (and indeed, a cheaper one) – they are siding with bloggers and discrediting the traditional media.
They don’t bother to channel this antithesis of bloggers vs. media too subtly. After the March 9 meeting, one common thought was voiced by many Poroshenko supporters online, including the attendees, compared the off-the-record meeting to another recent event – the yearly press conference that Poroshenko had on Feb. 28. Naturally, in these comparisons the meeting is described as an intelligent, constructive conversation as opposed to a useless, meaningless press conference.
(The press conference, indeed, was nearly useless – thanks to the way it was organized on the Poroshenko’s side, and to his evasive and not informative responses.)
Here’s one problem with bloggers: They aren’t responsible for what they say. There is no such thing as a blogger’s professional ethics. It may not matter that much when it means that your favorite Instagram blogger posts about a new gadget without the “#ad” hashtag. But it suddenly becomes a problem when you have dozens of shady accounts with many thousands of followers unanimously pushing a political message under a disguise of an unbiased opinion.
We know nothing about most of the 18 people that allegedly were in the meeting. We don’t know if they are independent or paid – and by whom. We don’t even know if all of the 18 bloggers are real people. Some of them post under pseudonyms. Some never show their faces, like a blogger known as Bogdan Karpenko that boasts nearly 28,000 followers on Facebook.
At the same time, several of the most popular and unsecretive of these bloggers have been appearing as commentators on TV, sharing their influence beyond the social media.
But regardless of their level of secretiveness, they have no responsibility to their readers – and can’t be reliable. But Poroshenko, by choosing to meet and share exclusive information with them, grants these people a far increased credibility.
A dodgy Facebook account with no real photos that shares political opinions with thousands of people? Good enough for our president – as long as the opinions are in his favor.
One key question remains and requires an answer: How deep is the president’s involvement here? Is Poroshenko unwisely endorsing dodgy bloggers because they favor him in their posts, or is he arranging this support through secret payments or favors?
