Photo: RIA Novosti

There are many relatively honest ways to turn news into an information bomb. One of them, as RBC found out, begins with a petition on Change.org and ends in the top news of Yandex. And it's inexpensive.

On May 25, the St. Petersburg website Lenizdat.ru reported that the editors were offered, for several thousand rubles, to publish news about a petition for the issuance of American citizenship to opposition politician Mikhail Kasyanov. This petition was published on May 22 on the world's popular website change.org
and at that time had collected more than 11 thousand signatures (by June 8 - 15 thousand). They wanted Lenizdat to rewrite the news already published on May 24 on the Reedus website and release it strictly from 08:00 to 08:45 on the morning of May 25.

The text had to be rewritten in a certain way. “The general message: American citizenship in exchange for squandering the country,” the Lenizdat editors quote the letter. The title of the text had to include the words “Kasyanov”, “citizenship”, “petition”, and the text had to mention the politician’s interview, his support for sanctions against Russia and the statement that he dreams of returning Crimea to Ukraine. It was proposed to rewrite the text by at least 70%, and the source recommended putting “Reedus”. The material could not be published with the mark “for advertising purposes” (thus the editors publish press releases at an open price of 3 thousand rubles), Lenizdat editor-in-chief Natalya Goncharova clarified in a conversation with RBC.

“A certain photographer from Moscow” approached Lenizdat with this proposal; he did not name the customer. “Photographer” offered long-term cooperation.

Lenizdat refused the offer and wrote publicly about it. On other sites, for example Lenta.ru, news about the same thing came out around the appointed 08:00, and a number of sites, for example “Arguments and Facts” and RBC, picked up the topic later. In Yandex.News (news aggregation service), a story was formed: “Petition to grant Kasyanov US citizenship has collected 12.5 thousand signatures,” including 287 news items.

“The news flow on this topic began to form at night from May 24 to 25, but in the morning, May 25, from 8 to 9 am, it became very dense: news on this topic came once a minute. This was one of the reasons why the story made it into the top 5 most popular,” a Yandex representative told RBC.

Signature virus

Representatives of two different PR agencies told RBC how the scheme for promoting such stories works. On the American website change.org, popular all over the world, a certain intermediary creates a petition with the content desired by the customer of the topic. In the case of the story from Lenizdat - the petition is dedicated to Kasyanov, the intermediary called himself Robert Hill and indicated the District of Columbia as his location. “But initially I saw that Hill was registered in the Moscow region, then this changed [information about the location of the author of the petition is displayed when you click on his profile],” says one of the PR people. RBC's interlocutor drew attention to the story with the petition and Kasyanov immediately after the publication of Lenizdat: on May 25, Hill was still a resident of the Moscow region.

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The next step is purchasing traffic on social networks. For example, we are talking about placing a paid ad-post with a petition in the MDK community on the VKontakte social network. When launching an advertising campaign for a petition, the audience is targeted by social status, geography, age, etc. “In the case of Kasyanov, it was necessary to purchase an American audience, for example, in groups on Facebook. They could sympathize with the opposition Russian politician,” says RBC’s interlocutor.

The organizer’s task when promoting a petition is to reach the right audience: “people sign what resonates with their ideas.” If the petition reaches the “right” people, then at the next stage - voting - “cheating” is no longer required. According to one of RBC’s interlocutors, real people are voting in support of the petition.

If a topic gets a lot of attention on change.org, it gets promoted to the top of that site and therefore to its Facebook page. After which the popularity of the petition is guaranteed: “Change.org has more than 950 thousand subscribers on Facebook. According to my estimate, about 9-10% of them are from Russia,” says one of the sources.

Change.org, like any other open Internet platform, is used by “completely different people, groups and organizations to solve problems that concern them and achieve their goals,” Dmitry Savelov, a representative of the platform, told RBC. He noted that Change.org noticed a petition about Kasyanov’s American citizenship because “the signature verification system found more than 15 thousand fake signatures in it, which were deleted immediately after verification.” As for the rest of the signatures, a large number of them were left by users from Russia, Savelov specified.

Thematic million

After promoting the petition and a sufficient number of signatories, it is distributed on LiveJournal (the Livejournal platform is part of the Rambler&Co holding) - through “opinion leaders”, popular bloggers. Rambler&Co representative Sofya Ivanova told RBC that all questions about “cheating” through bloggers should be addressed to them. “We as a platform (blog hosting) do not bring absolutely anything to the top,” she added. The site is not responsible for the content, Ivanova emphasized. The LJ rating is updated every hour and is calculated based on the number of page views by unique visitors. It involves 2 thousand popular entries, and the 25 most popular ones are displayed in the top.

The next stage that the topic of the petition goes through is publications in the media: according to RBC’s interlocutors, in the case of publications we can talk about both paid and free promotion. In the first case, we are talking about the purchase of about 30–40 online resources, which are indexed by Yandex. As RBC’s interlocutor clarified, these are usually “small resources, that is, not at the level of Lenta.ru or Dni.ru.” RBC’s source did not name the exact amount of expenses for such a “media package.” In the second case, we are talking about organic “penetration” in the media: the petition gains momentum and turns into a regular news item that publications use to write their materials, or a “paper” with signatures gets into popular topics on Twitter, which is also followed by journalists .

“The more publications publish the news, the better it will be indexed in Yandex and, accordingly, it will reach the top, and the topic will gain more publicity,” is how Lenizdat sees the logic of the actions of PR specialists. One of RBC’s interlocutors adds that through these tools it is possible to influence the “Russian Facebook audience”: “An educated and critical group that focuses on both the blogosphere and decent media.”

“PR agencies have been actively offering to promote theses through petitions for about a year now,” says RBC’s second interlocutor. A campaign to bring LJ to the top without the media, according to him, costs 0.65–1.5 million rubles. “The whole scheme, from the moment of creating a petition to bringing it to the top news, costs several hundred thousand rubles, not a lot of money,” says another source in the PR company. According to him, little money goes to the performers: the bulk of the funds from the customer is received by the one who directly supervises the topic.

RBC compiled a request for promotion through change.org and sent it to 10 large PR agencies in Russia with a request to send a price list for such a service. Of the 10, 4 responded, only one agency gave specific figures on promotion costs, the rest were ready for further dialogue, but only after contacting them from corporate mail (requests were sent from mail.ru). An employee of one of the PR agencies wrote that drawing up a PR plan for the campaign will cost 100 thousand rubles, which must be transferred immediately, and all promotion through a petition will require from 250 thousand to 1 million rubles.

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