Fact-checking and journalists professional standards usually are considered to be the best fail-safe against manipulations in media. However, we found that newsmakers are able to manipulate even the audience of so-called ‘high-quality media’ who practice all mentioned approaches. To prove this we have refined the concept of ‘pseudo-event’, introduced by D.J. Boorstin, by defining the term ‘fake newsworthy event’ as an event created by newsmakers, that is high-profile and attractive for media, but the only or particular aim of these actions is an agenda-setting, and this aim is not obvious from the origin of the action. Namely, the member of parliament may file some bill realizing that it cannot be adopted and trying just to shape the public opinion. Or some person may claim against a celebrity or businessman having no chance to win at trial. On the example of Ukrainian ‘high-quality media’ we showed that journalists usually do not take into account whether some topics are launched just for manipulating agenda-setting. To prove that we gathered the data about publications focused on such topics in Ukrainian ‘high-quality media’, we provided their discourse analysis, and compared the result with experts’ evaluations of ‘media quality’ and ‘artificiality rate’ of the topic. We have not found correlations between ‘artificiality’ of the topic and the number of publications. Recommendations were elaborated for the media workers if they want to avoid this type of manipulation.

The goal of the research is to develop a method for measuring topical social informationimpact on active people through monitoring the dynamics of social networks users interaction. Weintroduced the concept of interactive potential which can be determined through dynamics curveanalysis in order to interact with information. Regular measuring of news’ interactive potentialallows tracing the dynamics of social interest in some topics. We used the method to analyze trendingtopics in Ukrainian media and to describe the dynamics of people’s concern with political life andtheir readiness for public protests.

COVID-19 became an issue affecting different parts of our life. Different communication campaigns use vaccination as an information peg, argument in discussions, and so on. As a result, they have an impact on people’s attitudes to immunization. We applied the message analysis to the dataset of social media posts from Ukraine to detect the messages used in the communication regarding the vaccine and reveal communication campaigns propagating these messages. We found five campaigns launched by different actors and shaping the attitude to COVID-19 immunization expressed in the people’s posts. The incoherence of the information about immunization and authorities’ inconsistency in the communications about vaccines may lead to vaccine hesitancy and undermine confidence in the sources of the official information about COVID-19. Vaccine hesitancy has multifaceted nature and cannot be reduced just to politicians’ conspiracy theories or far-right propaganda.

<p>Media posts spread throughout social networks due to their ability to call the readers to actions which is the sign of their influence. These actions can be considered both as social and communicative. Therefore, they can be studied in relation with other social actions taken by the same users offline: participation in mass protests, purchase of goods, downloading mobile applications, etc.</p><p>The research has shown that not every share means the readiness for such offline actions. Most often this readiness is observed if media posts on a particular topic are shared through goal-rational actions and at the same time have a high influence on the audience. This influence is assessed by the author’s methodology of determining the interactive potential.</p>The research has also found that while the news is spread among the politically active Ukrainians, the proportion of different types of shares varies depending on the indicator of publication influence on the audience. For publications with high influence indicator, goal-rational and value-based shares are the most typical and if the indicator is low, the affective spreading occurs.

One of the most prominent parts of the 2019 Ukrainian presidential election was the mediatized topic of achieving Ukrainian church independence, and its symbol, the tomos document received from the Ecumenical Patriarch in January 2019. This process was a part of incumbent president Petro Poroshenko’s electoral campaign. Narrative analysis of this topic showed that it had a structure similar to that of classic Hollywood plots. It is unlike most other media narratives present in the information space. We prove that this topic had a major influence on its audience: media attention to the topic of Tomos was found to be closely correlated to Google search data associated with the ‘tomos’ search term and with electoral support for Poroshenko. However, this narrative`s audience was limited to the patriotic electorate, thus Poroshenko did not win the election. Nevertheless, the Tomos story became so influential that it can be considered a part of national and strategic narratives.