Mazepagate 2. How unscrupulous developers used Telegram and Facebook to collect votes for a petition to Zelensky
Methodology for quantitative analysis and content analysis of Telegram and Facebook channels.
Research hypothesis. A dishonest business has created a petition on the President’s Office website for Volodymyr Zelenskyi to sign a law with corruption risks (12089) and is collecting votes for it by using hidden advertising on Telegram and Facebook ads. At the same time, the risks of the project are being concealed, and false information is being used.
(This is the second part of the study. In the first part, Holka investigated how lobbyists for developers’ interests used Telegram channels in 2024 to shape the information field so that MPs would support legislative initiatives in the interests of developers).
The analysis covered Ukrainian Telegram channels. Research period: March 20 – April 2, 2025.
The TeleZip project collected messages that mentioned draft law No. 12089 and/or the authors of petitions related to this draft law (Andriy Semydidko, Michelle Tereshchenko, Yurii Levchenko). A total of 329 relevant messages were identified in 256 Telegram channels, including chats.
After that, the tone of the messages was analyzed to determine how the authors felt about draft law No. 12089 and petitions related to this draft law (“Positive,” “Neutral,” “Negative”).
You can find the list of these Telegram channels, messages, and the rating here.
The analysis on Facebook was carried out on the basis of the data from the “Advertising Library” by Meta. Research period: March 17 – April 2. The data is available at this link.
In particular, the “Advertising Publications” table contains information about all advertising posts on Meta that mentioned Law 12089. For the sake of completeness, we also checked advertisements with the words “law”, “petition”, “land”, and found no additional publications.
All inactive publications found have the note “Social issues, elections or politics”, which allows Meta to provide more detailed information about the advertisement (approximate number of impressions, approximate cost, etc.). The note was added either by the creators themselves or Meta noticed that the ad was political, stopped displaying it, and added the note to its library after the fact. See the “Note” column for details about the note.
The found active ad does not have a political note, so there is no information about its cost and impressions.
The Attitude to the law column shows whether the law is mentioned negatively, positively, or neutrally in the publication.
The table Political Advertising Expenditures shows the expenditures on advertising publications for the last 30 days of pages (03.03.-02.04.2025) that promoted a petition for signing a bill or a petition against it. These are only the costs of ads with a political note in the Meta library, so the real costs of pages that currently have active ads without a note are higher. The table also indicates whether all advertising publications during this period were related only to Law 12089.
The study is published on Detector Media.
The analytical text can be found below.
