Vakarchuk: vacations with a flavor of elections

The political perspectives of the rock star Svyatoslav Vakarchuk have been widely discussed since May 2017, when Ukrayinska Pravda outlet published results of ‘closed opinion polls’, which were allegedly used in Presidential Administration.

The article states that Vakarchuk is the third most popular candidate for the presidency and is second only to the current head of state Petro Poroshenko and leader of the "Batkivshchyna" party Yulia Tymoshenko.

This publication did not make Vakarchuk subject to political debate. Talks about his political future were renewed after three months - on August 26. At a press conference in Kharkiv, the singer called on Ukrainians to focus on state problems and stop the "language war". Vakarchuk also announced that he and his band "Okean Elzy" ("OE") takes a 'vacation' for a year.

Some social networks users understood it as preparation for the presidential elections to be held in Ukraine in 2019.

In the period from August 26 to September 4 there was a surge in the number of posts and comments about the "OE" frontman in the social networks. In total, 19 thousand posts and comments were written by 2 thousand users on Facebook and Twitter during that period.

We compared the content of the posts before and after the start of the information peak: from August 18 till August 25, and from August 26 to September 4. The samples included content from users who have more than 2000 followers - respectively, 167 and 538 messages.

It is likely that Vakarchuk was targeted by an information campaign, which, however, has found support in the audience.

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