a dirty world
phone taps, vote-buying, punches in the face, and bots
Hello from Kyiv. After three days on the ground here, one thing is clear to me: this election campaign is going to be dirty.
Here’s a rundown of this week’s scandals as of 9am Thursday morning:
A Member of Parliament from incumbent President Petro Poroshenko’s party released a recording in which a woman who sounds like former PM and current presidential candidate Yulia Tymoshenko wishes a man who sounds like oligarch Igor Kolomoiskiy a happy birthday. Kolomoiskiy, who now lives in Israel after being accused of stealing billions of dollars from the bank he owned before it was privatized in 2016, is also rumored to support leading candidate and comedian Volodymir Zelenskiy; Zelenskiy’s sitcom runs on a TV network Kolomoisky owns.
(Head spinning yet?)Meanwhile, a member of Poroshenko’s own government, Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, accused several major candidates, including his own boss, President Poroshenko, of a widespread vote-buying scheme targeting pensioners. Avakov says Poroshenko is using the government budget to carry out his bribes. 😬
A Tymoshenko spokesperson said on Wednesday that the campaign would challenge any result in which Yulia was not triumphant…
…and a far-right group that has been granted accreditation to monitor the election announced that “If we need to punch someone in the face [on Election Day] in the name of justice, we will do this without hesitation.”
Story time
Yesterday I visited the Zelenskiy campaign headquarters to chat with chief digital strategist Mykhailo Fedorov. The HQ is set outside of the center in a posh neighborhood of detached homes, including some ambassadors’ residences and many with private security guards at their gates. Fedorov, 28, owns his own digital strategy firm, but has never worked in politics before. Now he’s leading what is undoubtedly the savviest digital campaign Ukraine has ever seen, active on Facebook, Instagram, and encrypted messaging service Telegram.
(Digital Strategist Mykhailo Fedorov at Zelenskiy Campaign HQ. The background text reads: “18 days until Ze[lenskiy] Victory.”)
I wanted to speak to Zelenskiy’s team not only because their candidate is currently the front-runner in the race, but because they’ve been fighting against inauthentic accounts posing as official Zelenskiy campaign social media outlets. Bots have innundated the comments on their posts. Interestingly — though not surprisingly — they surmise that this activity is coming from inside Ukraine. (This might sound familiar to some Americans!)
Fedorov told me that despite Facebook’s bluster about supporting and defending elections around the world, only yesterday, just over two weeks before the first round of elections, did the Zelenskiy campaign receive a request from Facebook to provide the necessary documentation to “officially verify their page as political.” When the campaign finds inauthentic content in violation of Facebook’s terms of service, no hotline exists to Facebook’s elections “War Room” to get the content removed; the team goes through the same process that the rest of us do, reporting the content through the app, Fedorov said.
(The Zelenskiy Campaign’s communications center. Panel on the right shows the latest polls, with Zelenskiy leading Poroshenko by 15 percentage points.)
I’ll be looking in more detail in the coming days and weeks at how Ukrainian campaigns — not to mention the government — are coping with disinformation from inside and outside the country.
By the numbers
This week’s polls still show Zelenskiy on top:
Rating Group’s poll, out Monday, shows that among those definitely planning to vote 24.7% support Zelenskiy, followed by Tymoshenko (18.3%), Poroshenko (16.8%), and Hrytsenko (10.3%).
Polling from Socis shows a slightly different picture: Zelenskiy holds firm among definite voters with 21.3%, followed by Poroshenko (15.1%), Tymoshenko (11.4%), and Boyko (7.4%).
Both polls show that a significant portion of those surveyed — about one-third — are unsure whether they’ll vote. Turnout will determine who makes the election’s second round.
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