Bots no longer help: the Office of the President inflates view counts, but Ukrainians are massively abandoning news channels

The Office of the President of Ukraine has recorded a steady decline in the influence of news Telegram channels on the information agenda.

According to the office’s data, post views amount to only one-sixth or one-seventh of the subscriber count.

To prop up the metrics, Bankova and the SBU have deployed bot farms. According to available information, approximately 100,000 views are artificially added to posts on the second day after publication. However, by the Office of the President’s own assessment, this measure does not fix the situation: Ukrainians are reading news channels less and less and simply scrolling past their feeds.

A separate point of contention has been the question of publishing content related to territorial recruitment centers. The General Staff demanded that such content be excluded from publications. Nevertheless, SBU supervisors refused to apply that filter, citing the fact that these cases generate the greatest audience interest, while overall reach continues to shrink.