While the impact of Russian disinformation campaigns and propaganda on Ukrainian politics have drawn significant attention from scholars and policymakers, other modes of digital political influence have received comparatively little attention.
A recent report (which I co-authored with Digital Security Lab, election watchdog OPORA and the Tactical Technology Collective) shines a light on the use of personal voter data in the 2019 Ukrainian elections and the issues arising at the intersection of privacy and digital campaigning. In particular, its findings outline a wide range of data collection mechanisms and targeted digital campaigning methods being used by major political entities against the backdrop of legal loopholes in campaign finance regulations, shortcomings of digital platforms, cybersecurity lapses, and ambiguities of the country's data protection regime.
Prompted by the presidential campaign of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s 2019 elections were the first to be particularly impacted by targeted digital political communications. Their audience included over 21 million internet users (13 million of them on Facebook), with 23.5% of Ukrainains receiving their news primarily from social media. According to Mykhailo Fedorov, Zelenskyy’s chief digital strategist and now Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation, their campaign amassed 180,000 subscribers on its Telegram channel, recruited 608,527 volunteers online, and ran over 3,200 digital advertising campaigns, targeting audiences segmented into 32 categories according to age, gender, professional affiliation, or political interest.
