About blocking

Ukrainian activists faced a massive blocking wave in 2013-2014 during the Maidan for the first time. It was so remarkable that in 2015, Ukrainian users brought it to trends by asking Mark Zuckerberg about this issue during his Q&A session (unfortunately, without a definite answer from the Facebook founder).

With the full-fledged Russian invasion, this issue became more acute again: Ukrainian activists can be banned several times within a single week, some for a limited period, and some “forever.” Denis Dovgopoliy, the coordinator of the initiative of the economic ban of the Russian Federation, had multiple bans on Facebook for sharp words toward Russians. Notably, the Facebook support reacts to hate speech cases (that’s how Russian bots with various fun names mark and report posts). So, he switched to Telegram because of the high risk of being blocked on Facebook.

A famous journalist and volunteer, Yana Suporovska, is one of the oldies of the Ukrainian Twitter segment and has received no claim for the last 13 years. But it changed with the full-scale war. She told AIN.Capital that during the first few weeks, Russian bots ignored Twitter. But then several aggressive waves arose: for example, bots could comment on posts of Ukrainian activists to provoke them for showing emotions and report them after that. A bit later, they focused on people who collect funds for our army.

“My story started after I collected significant amounts. We collected money for a drone for a National Guard Special Forces unit. It was expensive, 800.000 UAH, but we succeeded. The first 12-hour ban was for my ironic reply. I sent an appeal, but it was declined. Then they targeted my old tweets, all of them. They even reported a tweet with a picture of me hugging my son on Mother’s Day. Finally, claims reached the reply with the number of a credit card I used to collect money for the drone. Twitter assessed it as publishing personal information. So, I got three strikes, and my account was banned ‘forever,’” she said.

The stories of Yana and Denis, unfortunately, are few of many. And not always Ukrainian Twitter Community can help unban a profile. Anonymous activists who work on this issue informed AIN.Capital that massive blocking on Facebook started with the full-fledged invasion. Then Meta reps announced that they would not block accounts for sharing information about war crimes. But it was exactly the case: blocked accounts and hidden hashtags: just remember the story with hashtags about the Bucha massacre.

“Now I see less blocking, but it goes on. For example, popular Twitter accounts can be banned for hate speech or sharing personal data (credit card numbers, photos of bills, etc.) because the volunteers publish reports about spending funds they raised. Now Instagram and Facebook bans are rare to see, but they can delete posts and comments for hate speech and make warnings,” the activists added.

And it always costs us undelivered drones and vests for the frontline or meds and food for Ukrainian cities destroyed by Russian invaders. So what do users do to help in such cases?

What to do?

The activists who deal with unblocking accounts give recommendations to people providing volunteer aid, informational fighters, or other activists — create a backup channel.

“The first recommendation is to have a backup in case of blocking. If we recommended ‘just not to provoke them,’ it would sound like a pure cynicism. Sometimes the support service can help. I don’t know if public appeals have some influence on the Twitter Support, but at least somebody can see it and connect them directly.”

Ukrainian users initiate Twitter storms to force specific posts and hashtags in English into the trends and mention the Twitter Support, the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine that also works on this issue, Twitter Co-Founder Jack Dorsey, and others.

According to the Ministry of Digital Transformation, the agency maintains contact with the Meta and Twitter teams to address issues related to the Ukrainian activists’ blocking. You can also report blocking of such accounts to the ministry at pr@thedigital.gov.ua.

Context

• The fact is that war posts about the Russian invaders are now the key reason why Ukrainian accounts can be banned. And, as AIN.Capital knows, some banned posts did not even violate Facebook policy — it could simply contain criticism of the Russian regime or a report on the disastrous consequences of Russia’s military aggression.
• So, activists that help to unban Ukrainian accounts often urge users to be more careful when writing public posts because Facebook is strictly against hate speech and violence. Until now, content analysts of the social media company did not consider the context of such posts.

What has changed?

Facebook and Instagram have temporarily changed their hate speech policy, allowing aggressive expressions like ‘death to the Russian invaders.’ But the company still does not allow aggression toward Russian civilians (apparently, from Facebook’s point of view, only the Russian army can express aggression toward civilians). It is also allowed to call for the death of Russia’s leaders if the post does not contain other targets or specific means (location or method).

What specifically is allowed:

• hate speech targeting Russian soldiers (except war prisoners)
• hate speech targeting Russians where it is clear that the context is Russia’s war in Ukraine (e.g., content mentions the invasion, self-defense, etc.)
• call for death to Putin

The press service of Meta confirmed the change of rules to the editor of AIN.Capital:

“In light of the ongoing invasion of Ukraine, we made a temporary exception for those affected by war, to express sentiments toward invading armed forces such as ‘death to the Russian invaders.’ These are temporary measures designed to preserve voice and expression for people who are facing invasion. As always, we are prohibiting calls for violence against Russians outside of the narrow context of the current invasion”

• The lawsuit being considered in the Korosten District Court is about the protection of honor and business reputation. It is related to comments on Facebook. This case has been pending for several years. In recent court decisions on this case, the names of the plaintiff and the defendant are hidden. 
• But in earlier decisions, it can be found that the lawsuit was filed by Ovruch town mayor Ivan Korud. The text of the comments regarding the town mayor and his activities is also quoted in the court documents. 
• Korud filed the lawsuit back in July 2019, demanding to recognize the information in the comments as unreliable, degrading honor and dignity, as well as to oblige the defendant to remove these comments and refute the information. 
• According to sud.ua, the plaintiff filed a petition summoning the owner of Facebook to court as a co-defendant and the court accepted this petition. Now Zuckerberg will have a distraction from creating the Metaverse in order to attend the trial in the Zhytomyr region.

As you can see on a screenshot of an email letter from Facebook, so far, the company is ready to hire remote developers only from seven countries of the European Union.

The email says, “We are about to kick off the process for our first ever cohort of remote engineers in Germany, Netherlands, Ireland, Spain, Poland, France and Italy to join us in 2022 here at Meta (Facebook).”

As Maksym Ishchenko noted, now even large companies with a strong HR brand come to the point where they have to consider candidates for remote work.

“Remote work becomes as much of a bun as free lunches in the office or a budget for training. For Ukraine, this is certainly great news – more and more direct employers will come in search of talent to Ukraine, too. We already see this on the Genie, and in 2022, the share of such direct contracts I think will at least double,” wrote Ishchenko.

Previously, American billionaire Mark Zuckerberg announced the renaming of his company Facebook to Meta. He plans to change the social network to a metaworld — a global virtual reality platform where all users will communicate with no need to be in a certain physical space and without being tied to special gadgets developed for the social network.

It was also reported that Facebook intends to hire 10,000 highly skilled workers in the EU over the next five years. It needs them to create its own version of the “Internet of the future” and the “metauniverse.”

• According to Business Insider, Oleksandr Solonchenko, called the “Ukrainian hacker,” has collected the data of 178 million users of Facebook Messenger, using a vulnerable feature of Facebook Messenger called “contact importer.” Following the explanation of the topical Telegram channel, this vulnerable feature allowed to input random phone numbers and then, through the import contacts feature, to see the corresponding UID social network’s codes.
• He has created a program emulating the work of the Android app and has got access to the users’ data. According to Facebook’s official statement from January 2018 to October 2019, the suspect has collected information of 178 million users. After having processed the data, he put it for sale on Raid Forums and other places where people buy and sell illegally collected user data from various services. According to Business Insider, Facebook has evidence showing that Solonchenko was the one who sold the data.
• It is unknown how much was earned by the Ukrainian hacker. We know that he was using solomame and barak_obama nicknames on Darknet.
• This is not the first such incident. Previously, hackers scraped data for 533 million users through the same feature as Solonchenko used and posted it in a hacking forum. We have reported on that leak before.

• The case of Sanchez v. France, in which the court rendered this decision, relates to the events dated October 2011. Then Julien Sanchez, the mayor of Beaucaire, a town in the south of France, during the parliamentary elections, has published a Facebook post about his political opponent. His supporters published offensive comments about Muslim residents of the city.
• In 2013, Sanchez and others responsible for writing the comments were accused of inciting inter-ethnic, religious, and racial hatred. The case went to court and all were found guilty and fined 4,000 euros (this amount was reduced at a later date).
• After losing his appeal in the French courts, Sanchez appealed to the European Court of Human Rights, claiming a violation of the right to freedom of expression. His case was heard there in September 2015.
• After reviewing the case, the ECHR did not agree that the decisions of previous courts violated the right to freedom of speech. So, it decided to leave them unchanged. According to the court, Sanchez is responsible for other users’ comments promoting hatred against a group of people. After all, he did not remove these comments from his post for six weeks, and his Facebook page is publicly available. Which means he is responsible for the content of those comments.

“The applicant had knowingly made the wall of his Facebook account public, thereby allowing his friends to post comments there. He had thus been under a duty to monitor the content of the statements published. In addition, the Criminal Court had emphasized that the applicant could not have been unaware that his account was likely to attract comments of a political nature, which by definition were polemical and should therefore have been monitored even more carefully by him. The Court of Appeal had held, along similar lines, that his status as a political figure required even greater vigilance on his part,” the court decision reads.

You can read the decision on the case here:

Facebook

In the 1990s, it would have had the same name as it had originally in 2004: The Facebook. Its news feed would have looked simple: events, photos, groups, pages, and settings. To edit a profile photo, you would have had to use Paint.

WhatsApp

You wouldn’t have sent selfies on WhatsApp in the ’90s, but you would have easily chatted with MP3 messages, photos, gifs, and emoticons. There’s a 99% chance you’d have a cartoon character as your avatar and an illogical combination of numbers as your name.

Twitter

It’s easy – run the program and start tweeting. There is always something to write about.

YouTube

There would have been a thousand (not millions) different videos on YouTube in the ’90s: about skateboarding, with people listening to cassette tapes in their car, Internet guides, and, obviously, cat videos.

Spotify

Today’s popular music streaming service would have probably looked like the old Winamp player with a touch of psychedelia and no images, only band names.

Twitch

Everyone loves Fortnite, Minecraft, and Counter-Strike nowadays. In the ’90s, racing would probably have been at the peak of popularity, and yes, only with 2D-looking graphics.

Airbnb

The color scheme of the platform would have been called Barbie’s Dream House. In addition, other classic 90’s elements would have been present: flashing and rotating stars and arrows – how else would you know about a super offer?

How to hide Like counts on Instagram

In a nutshell:

• Select the photo where you want to hide the likes
• Click on the triple dot icon at the top of the photo
• Tap “Hide like count”
• If it is a video, the user hides not only the number of likes but also the number of views

Details

Users have two new options: to hide the number of likes on personal photos and disable the counter on the posts of other users. It’s noteworthy that the user can’t hide all the likes on personal photos at once – they can enable the feature in the settings of each image. Here’s how to do it:

• Open your Instafram prifile
• Click on the photo where you want to hide likes
• Click the triple dot icon at the top of the photo
• Tap “Hide like count”

You can also hide the counter while posting a photo. To do this, go to “Settings” and enable the option “Hide Like and View Counts.”

Besides, you can hide the number of likes of other users in Instagram settings. In this case, the user won’t be able to see the number of likes, while the feed will still be generated based on potentially interesting posts for a particular person.

• Go to Settings and select Privacy
• Click on Posts
• Enable the option “Hide Like and View Counts”

Why it’s interesting

Facebook, which owns Instagram, says the feature of hiding the likes will help focus users on the content rather than studying its popularity. For this reason, the company is actively working on its implementation, particularly on Facebook. The preliminary testing showed that not all users need such a feature – for example, some of them use data to determine the popularity or relevance of their content. Therefore the company decided to provide some variants of settings.

It is also interesting that Instagram has not announced the official launch of this feature. In April 2021, it became known only about the start of global testing. Users who received access to this option were promised to send a notification, but our journalist has not received any notifications.

• As WhatsApp informs, no one will have their accounts deleted or lose functionality of WhatsApp on May 15th because of this update. They will still be able to accept the new privacy policy after this date.
• WhatsApp will periodically remind users to accept the updates for a few more weeks. Then, a notification will come, which can no longer be rejected.
• From the date of receipt of the persistent reminder, the functionality of the messenger will be limited. The users will no longer have access to the list of chats; they will not be able to make calls and write messages – only to answer the incoming phone and video calls.

• After a few weeks of limited functionality, the users will not be able to receive incoming calls or notifications, and WhatsApp will stop sending messages and calls to their phones.
• After 120 days, WhatsApp will delete the accounts of those who never accepted the new privacy policy, treating them as inactive.

How it works

The service analyzes 32 indicators from the moment when a page was created: the number of posts, friends` activity, the ratio of followers to active page visitors, and other qualitative and quantitative engagement metrics. The result is calculated individually based on 100% performance capabilities, and the user is ranked from 1 to 100.

If the score is less than 60, it is early days to talk about influence. Obtained 90 points shows that a person has all chances to become an ambassador of a well-known brand.

The project aims to show that everyone has influence and can monetize their social media. The company explains: “It is not necessary to have a million followers to get a high ranking. It is enough to be active in a social media and make interesting content which readers like.”

How can you find out your ranking

Follow the link and log in to your account. In a few seconds, the algorithm will calculate all the indicators and give you the result.

Here you can also see your level of activity in social media over the past 30 days.

Besides obtaining the statistics, the user can see the ranking of friends and which place among them they occupy.

About the Project

Myscore was created as part of the Publicfast influence marketing platform and was launched in 2014. Back then, only Facebook was taken for calculation of scores with only a couple of parameters: the number of friends and followers, likes, comments, and reposts, together with the number of publications done over the last 30 days.

Therefore, the platform was closed for updating and later relaunched after advancement of the following indicators: the AI was improved, the number of analyzed indicators was increased (there are now 32 of them) and Instagram was added.

The letter was posted on Twitter. AIN.UA selected the key points.

Insomnia, paranoia, and mental disorders

The author of the letter worked at Accenture as a Facebook content moderator for 2.5 years. He/she saw a lot of bad things during that time.

“This is a job that’s impossible not to take home with you. It is common to experience fatigue, weight changes, and intrusive thoughts, and I’ve heard stories from people on child exploitation queues who started seeing every adult with a child as a potential predator.

I know people who went on psychiatric medication for the first time while working as a content analyst and others who self-medicate with alcohol and drugs,” the letter says.

Are you upset? Just stop being upset!

Employee health support programs are ineffective. Special coaches work with the analysts to provide emotional support. The author notes that they know their job well, but it is not easy to get an appointment because of their remote work and management attitudes.

Most managers believe that coping with psychological problems is very easy – you just need to stop getting upset!

“If you see something that upsets you, you should be able to deal with it by stepping away and doing a breathing exercise; if the problem is really bad, you can talk to a wellness coach.”

However, as the author points out, the real problem is not the lingering impact of individual images. There are thousands of such pictures that Facebook moderators deal with every day.

“Content analysts are paid to look at the worst of humanity for eight hours a day. We’re the tonsils of the internet, a constantly bombarded first line of defense against potential trauma to the userbase.”

Employees who can no longer bear the stress are offered to quit their jobs. However, the author notes that many are not ready to take such a step because if they lose their jobs during a pandemic, they will lose the opportunity to feed their families. Getting another job is difficult – since all moderators sign NDAs with not very clear terms of non-disclosure. People do not know for sure what they can and cannot hypothetically disclose about their previous job during an interview. That makes it very difficult to get hired.

The author notes that he/she has not been able to access an NDA to examine since he/she first signed it.

How to deal with it

The author gives some recommendations on how to make life easier for Facebook moderators.

1. Give managers training that impresses upon them the fact that mental health can’t be dealt with mechanically.
2. Give analysts more wellness time and write this into contracts.
3. Allow content analysts to claim therapy as an expense or give vouchers covering the cost of therapy.
4. Relax the NDA.
5. The most important one: Reduce the amount of time that people spend in safety queues. All workers should have the option to move to another queue every six months. Further, they shouldn’t spend all of their work time in these queues. They should be trained on something else so that they only spend about half of their work hours on safety.

The system is bad not only for content analysts but for Facebook itself

“Those who spend the most time in the queues have the least input as to policy. Analysts are able to raise issues to QAs who can then raise them to Facebook FTEs. It can take months for issues to be addressed, if they are addressed at all.”

The author of the letter says that it would be easier if the analysts could communicate directly with those responsible for designing policy. It would be ideal if there were regularly scheduled meetings between analysts and policy designers in addition to avenues for communication in case of emergencies.

Dream nightmare job

In 2019, The Verge talked to 12 former Facebook content moderators to learn how much they were paid for their work. It turned out that the conditions, to put it mildly, were not very good.

The median salary at Facebook is $240,000 a year, while moderators in Arizona make only $28,800. They work in cramped offices with very few bathroom stalls. Meanwhile, working hours are strictly regulated: they have two 15-minute breaks and one 30-minute lunch break. Also, they can spend another nine minutes a day of “wellness time,” which employees are supposed to use if they feel traumatized by content.

Moderators often see terrible things – racist jokes, videos of murders, or sex with animals. The ability to cope with stress is further complicated by the fact that they cannot share this with anyone – even their closest family members. Curiously, the current employees with whom journalists managed to talk said that they do not frequently see disturbing content – in most cases, those are safe posts.

In 2018, a former Facebook moderator in California sued the company, saying her job as a contractor had left her with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). There are many cases like this; it’s just not all of them reach the courts. Former employees complain of paranoia, suicidal thoughts, and panic attacks.

As ITC.UA reports, these are real shares, just like those listed on foreign exchanges. So you can invest in them and receive dividends.

In total, stocks of 14 foreign issuers are available on PFTS

The cost of shares of these six companies that became available on the PFTS Stock Exchange is:

• Microsoft Corporation (MSFT) — ₴7,581
• Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) — ₴2,324
• Visa Inc. (V) — ₴6,532
• Tesla Inc (TSLA) — ₴21,763
• Netflix Inc (NFLX) — ₴15,974
• Facebook Inc (FB) — ₴8,938

In addition to these companies, shares of eight other foreign issuers are also available on the PFTS Stock Exchange:

• Apple (AAPL)
• Biz Finance (201003920)
• Blackrock Fund Advisers (TLT)
• Equity Residential (EQR)
• Ferrexpro (FXPO, a Ukrainian company but traded on the London Stock Exchange)
• MHP (MHPC, a Ukrainian company but listed on the London Stock Exchange)
• State Street Global Advisors Trust Company (SPY)
• US Department of the Treasury (US9128283)

According to the law, in order to buy securities on the stock exchange, you need to contact an intermediary – an investment company or a broker.

According to ITC.UA, Apple applied for the registration of the trademarks back in 2017.

As previously reported by AIN.UA, lately, Apple has been regularly looking for employees to staff its Kyiv office that is registered in the Pecherskyi District of Kyiv, at the IQ Business Center. Now the company is looking for a Tax Analyst and a Country Field Staff Manager.

The company registered a Ukrainian legal entity back in April 2020, but no specific plans on entering the market have been announced.

As for Facebook, it has registered the trademark of the standalone virtual reality headset Oculus, which is not yet officially sold in Ukraine.

According to Facebook’s press service, Get Digital‘s lessons and resources are based on materials provided by Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley.

About the Get Digital program

Get Digital platform in Ukraine was launched as part of Digital Literacy Week, a nationwide initiative aimed at promoting computer skills.

Get Digital focuses on four main topics:

• Basic digital skills and media literacy
• Coding, STE(A)M, and artificial intelligence
• Advanced digital skills and employability
• Digital cultural heritage

The information is divided into five main blocks: Digital Foundations, Digital Wellness, Digital Engagement, Digital Empowerment, and Digital Opportunities.

“As our lives are increasingly moving online because of the pandemic, it is important to provide young Internet users with the knowledge and skills that will encourage them to use digital information in a useful way, benefit from it while minimizing the risks they may face online,” says Kateryna Kruk, Facebook Public Policy Manager for Central and Eastern Europe.

The teacher lessons were developed by the Youth and Media team at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, which has made them available worldwide through a Creative Commons license, The Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, and Teaching Tolerance.

Other content partners include the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, Net Family News, the Micro: bit Educational Foundation, and Beyond Differences.

Dynamics of growth of audiences of social media:

The Ukrainian Facebook ad-reachable audience now totals 22 million.

Ukrainian users are googling Facebook less and less, but the authors of the research attribute this to the fact that most already have the application:

The compilers of the research report that over the past six months, the number of Facebook-users has decreased in six regional centers, but social media continues to grow in smaller cities.

Facebook is more popular than Instagram in almost all regions.

The highest Instagram penetration is in Kyiv region (51%), Odesa region (42%) and Dnipropetrovsk region (41%). The lowest – in Kirovohrad region (25%):

Instagram is ahead of Facebook among Ukrainian users of 29 years old and younger.

Among the 18-23 age group, the penetration rate can be higher than 100% (because young users may have several accounts).

Femail users continue to make the most of Facebook’s Ukrainian audience.

Most Ukrainian users visit Facebook via their mobile phones. Only 600,000 users access the social media from desktops, and 11.55 million only via mobile devices (and this number is up slightly compared to last July).

There are the following ones:

• shares of Tesla, Inc. (ISIN code – US88160R1014)
• shares of Facebook Inc. (ISIN code – US30303M1027)
• shares of Netflix Inc. (ISIN code – US64110L1061)
• shares of Microsoft Corporation (ISIN code – US5949181045)
• shares of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (ISIN code – US5949181045)
• shares of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc
• shares of Visa, Inc. (ISIN code – US92826C8394)

The corresponding decisions were published on the website of the Commission on December 8.

To recap, in 2017, new rules of the NBU came into force, according to which Ukrainian citizens can officially invest up to $50,000 per year abroad from their Ukrainian bank account. Since then, under these rules, Ukrainians have already bought shares in Facebook.

According to the Facebook press office, the network has been spreading comments supporting Yulia Tymoshenko and the party Batkivshchyna and criticizing their political opponents, with $2.1 million spent on advertising.

The network’s activity

The network was using fake accounts, some of which have been identified and deactivated by Facebook automated systems. Its members were creating pages for fictitious persons, commenting publications by other users, posting messages in groups, and managing pages; oftentimes, they positioned themselves as local news media.

“This network was spreading news and information about current events in Ukraine connected with politics and elections, mainly in the Ukrainian language. Among them were comments supporting Yulia Tymoshenko and the party Batkivshchyna and criticizing their political opponents: the president Volodymyr Zelensky and the ex-president Petro Poroshenko,” a statement by Facebook says.

Their activities were mainly focused on the recent elections: both presidential and parliamentary in 2019, and local elections in 2020. Facebook disclosed this network as part of its investigation into suspicions of coordinated inauthentic behavior in the region. Public complaints helped to uncover it.

“Although the people behind this activity tried to hide their identity, the investigation revealed that they were connected to MAS Agency, an advertising agency in Ukraine, and individuals involved with Yulia Tymoshenko’s campaign and the political party Batkivshchyna,” Facebook said.

The network’s size

According to the company, about $2.1 million was spent to advertise the network. The total audience reached by the network was about 889,000 users.

General information about the removed network:

• Presence on Facebook and Instagram: 46 accounts, 44 pages, and 1 group on Facebook; 3 accounts on Instagram.
• Readers: About 889,000 followers of one or more Facebook pages and about 1,500 people followed one or more of these accounts on Instagram.
• Advertising: About $2.1 million was spent on advertising on Facebook and Instagram, mostly paid in dollars.

As reported to AIN.UA by Areyes Studio representatives, now companies and brands cooperating with the studio will have access to accelerated moderation and exclusive support from Facebook.

About Facebook Spark AR

Facebook Spark AR is an augmented reality platform that allows creating AR-powered effects for mobile devices. In fact, it is Photoshop or Sketch in the AR world.

Currently, Spark AR is the largest platform for mobile AR, with more than 400,000 creators from around the world, 1.2 million AR-effects, which are viewed by more than 150 billion people in three months.

The following features are available to the Facebook Spark Network partner:

• Direct access to Facebook product teams;
• Connection to the Facebook Business Partner community;
• Exclusive access to testing of new AR products of Facebook;
• Direct access to the leading creators of the Facebook Spark Network ecosystem;
• The opportunity of joint marketing with Facebook Spark AR.

How to become a Spark AR Partner

As representatives of Areyes Studio told AIN.UA, you can apply to become a Spark AR Partner on the website.

The choice was made based on the following key parameters:

• Quality and visual aesthetics of the end product;
• Technical capabilities of the team (back camera, audio, javascript, etc.) in implementing different types of tasks;
• Experience in working with businesses and top brands.

Commercial use of Spark AR

According to Alexandr Surnin, CEO at Areyes, AR technologies can be used by anyone and acquaint people with any product.

“Beauty brands can use AR to allow their followers to virtually “try on” makeup. Furniture companies can use AR to show how their products will look like in the home of a potential buyer, and fashion brands can use AR to create virtual dressing rooms to see how the clothes or accessories fit people,” Surnin said.

What’s new in the bill?

The document supplements the Tax Code with another Article 208 on the taxation of electronic services. According to the text of this article:

• Electronic services that non-resident companies supply to individuals in Ukraine are subject to VAT (20%).
• A non-resident company is a company that does not have a permanent representative office in the country. It must register in the Ukrainian tax office as a VAT payer to provide services to Ukrainians. This condition works if the previous year, the company delivered services to individuals in Ukraine for the equivalent of UAH 1 million. If the amount is less, it is possible to register as a VAT payer voluntarily. All this can be done through the electronic service “VAT for non-residents.”
• If services are delivered in Ukraine through an intermediary, the one is the supplier for this project. If the intermediary is also a non-resident, he or she has to act following the article.
• At the same time, the “tax on foreign advertising” rule is excluded from the code. That means that Ukrainian legal entities and individual entrepreneurs will not have to pay a 20% tax when buying electronic services from foreign companies, as Oleksandr Bornyakov, the Deputy Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, explains.

The authors of the bill in an explanatory note cite the example of the EU countries and Russia. In the latter, such services are subject to VAT since January 1, 2017. Since then, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Bloomberg, Alibaba, Booking.com have registered as VAT payers in the Russian Federation, according to the authors of the bill.

Analysis of similar bills

Previously, we wrote more about what this initiative can result in (in particular, for the advertising market).

A similar bill has already been submitted to the parliament in May this year, but voting has not yet been held. At that time, many experts agreed that it would mean a 20% increase in the price of services for users.

The opening is available on the Facebook official website.

Responsibilities

• Analyze key metrics to improve operational workflows;
• Investigate and resolve issues that are reported on Facebook such as requests for account support and reports of potentially abusive content;
• Offer and implement solutions that will help improve support for Ukrainian users;
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to improve Facebook processes and tools;
• Use problem-solving skills to resolve large and complex business problems.

Required skills

• 2+ years of professional experience within an operations environment;
• Fluency in written and conversational Ukrainian and demonstrable ongoing connection with the community in Ukraine and detailed knowledge of region’s culture and common practices;
• Strong written and verbal communication skills in English;
• Bachelors degree and/or masters;
• Experience communicating with a variety of audiences and stakeholders;
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills;
• Ability to thrive in a constantly changing Operations environment and collaborate effectively with a variety of individuals and internal organizations;
• Passion for supporting the Facebook and Instagram community;

Preferred skills

• Technical and data skills such as Excel and SQL;
• Experience with visualization tools such as Tableau to drive efficient analytics and reporting;
• Fluency in Russian is preferred;
• Experience with process improvement or project management.

You can apply for a job by clicking on the link.

How to create a Facebook Avatar

• Open the Facebook application on your smartphone and tap the menu (three horizontal lines at the bottom of the screen).
• Scroll down and tap “See More.”
• Tap on “Avatars.”

• Create a character: choose your skin tone, face and eye shape, hairstyle, clothes, and other details.
• Tap the checkbox and save your avatar.

Facebook is considering extending the capabilities of Avatars to be used as a profile or group pictures.

The Government believes that such innovations will create extra ₴3 billion of tax revenues, as was expressly stated by the Head of Verkhovna Rada’s Committee on Finance, Taxation and Customs Policy, Danylo Hetmatnsev. He also assured the public that Facebook and Viber had agreed to collaborate. AIN.UA’s editor has been able to neither obtain comments from the representatives of the services nor find out where the 3 billion figure came from. The committee that initiated the bill also failed to explain it. It is understood that Ukrainian advertisers themselves will pay for VAT introduction: it is they who will have to pay more for advertising services.

In this article, the AIN.UA editor explains what the draft bill is suggesting, to whom it is targeting, and how it will affect the digital advertising market.

About the bill

The matter concerns the bill No. 2634 on the VAT on digital services provided by foreign companies with no Ukrainian offices to individuals in Ukraine. What this document proposes to change:

• Non-residents having no representative office in Ukraine and providing digital services to individuals in Ukraine are to be added to the list of VAT payers. Intermediaries for such types of services should be added as well.
• The VAT is 20% and is included in the price of digital services.
• According to the text of the bill, digital services include all services provided via the Internet, such as:
  • images, texts, photos;
  • games (incl. gambling);
  • advertising services on the Internet and in mobile applications;
  • cloud-based data storage services;
  • software supply and updating, remote software maintenance, etc.
• Non-resident companies without local representative offices should be registered as VAT payers. The registration is mandatory if the company generated a revenue of more than ₴1 million for digital services in Ukraine during the previous year. Such companies have been promised a simplified registration procedure. They do not issue VAT invoices but submit simplified tax returns.
• If a non-resident company does not get registered it will be liable to a fine of ₴8,500.

In a nutshell: foreign companies having no representative offices in Ukraine (such as Facebook or Viber), or intermediaries granting access to their services, will have to be registered as VAT payers and pay the VAT on services provided to individuals, with the sum of the tax included in the price of their services.

Regardless of the ₴8,500 fine, it is still unclear how exactly the Ukrainian tax authorities will ensure that non-resident companies are registered in Ukraine as VAT-payers.

If the bill is passed, it will enter into force the day following the publication and will cover taxation periods after January 1, 2021.

What do non-resident companies say?

In a recent interview, the Head of Verkhovna Rada’s Committee on Finance, Taxation and Customs Policy (and the initiator of this project), Danylo Hetmatnsev said, that these innovations have already been discussed with international companies that provide digital services to Ukrainians. According to him, Facebook and Viber agreed to pay VAT in Ukraine, and revenues from VAT on advertising services will bring the budget ₴3 billion per year.

The editor of AIN.UA has addressed requests to representatives of Facebook and Viber. Viber refused to comment, the Facebook press service promised to provide data, but at the time of publishing this article, there was no response.

It is worth noting that not many international companies that provide digital services are physically present in Ukraine. For example, Google has an office in Kyiv and has been registered in Ukraine as a VAT payer since 2007. Facebook, Valve, Viber, Amazon, Alibaba, and others have no registered legal entities in Ukraine.

Conclusions

Let’s summarize everything we’ve written before, by way of example. There is a Ukrainian company X, which advertises its services on Google and Facebook. If the bill is passed, the price of advertising on Google will not change for it, because Google already pays VAT, and includes it in the price of its services.

The prices of ads on Facebook will increase by 20% if the company pays them as a private individual. But individual employees of the company will face the fact that the subscription to Netflix and games on Steam have increased in price.

All this will only happen if Facebook, Netflix, and others register as Ukrainian VAT payers.

The editors of AIN.UA will follow the passing of this bill. We will write more details about how it will work for individuals who use unadvertised digital services of foreign companies, a little later.

More than 250 teams from all over the world took part in this year’s hackathon. The total prize fund was $165,000.

About the project

Faceboard (HeadBoard) is an augmented reality hybrid racing game with arcade elements, where you need to keep balance with your head and facial gestures.

The developers

Alexander and Alexey Surnin from the Ukrainian studio Areyes developed this game.

Challenge results

In October 2019, Ukrainians took the first place at the regional level, being ahead of all the developers from Europe (then the project was called Faceboard).

And in November, they were among the top three winners of the global competition with an updated version.

The second place went to the team from India, and the first place went to Indonesia.

Size of the Ukrainian audience

In 2019, there were two significant changes in the size of the audience of Facebook and Instagram in the Ukrainian segment. After the number of users of both platforms peaked in February 2019, Facebook administration has massively deleted fake accounts. Then the number of users of Ukrainian Facebook decreased from 13 to 12 million, and Instagram – from 11 to 10.

However, as of September, the size of the audience had recovered.

• According to the agency, as of September 2019, the Ukrainian Facebook audience was 0.7% of the global audience. By the number of users, Ukraine was ranked 33^rd globally and 8^th in Europe.
• The Ukrainian audience is larger than the Russian audience (0.4% of the global audience), ranking only 42^nd in the world.
• Facebook penetration in Ukraine is 31%, which is lower than in EU countries (for comparison in the Czech Republic – 47%, France – 46%).
• As for Instagram – Ukraine is in the lead (26%), but is second to Russia (28%) and Turkey (48%).
• The key factor that determines the popularity of Facebook in Ukraine is the ban on Russian social networks. Without this step, the picture could be similar to the indicators of neighboring Belarus, which almost repeat the proportions of Russia (Facebook is used only by 6-7% of the population, Instagram – 26-28%).

Activity of Ukrainian users

Ukrainians became significantly more active users of Facebook during the first half of 2019. So, as of September 2019, on average, during one month, one user shared 2 posts, left 3 comments, and gave 17 likes. These indicators are higher than the world average.

Particular attention draws the high level of interaction of Ukrainians with advertising posts. In the span of half a year, they began clicking on them one and a half times more (18 in September against 13 at the beginning of the year). Here, the Ukrainian audience is also well ahead of the world (an average of 12 clicks).

Instagram for youth, Facebook for adults

Instagram is incredibly popular with young people – 99% of Ukrainians aged 18-24 have their profiles here. Every second (56%) citizen aged 25-35 are registered on Instagram and only a quarter (27%) of those aged 36-45.

The Ukrainian segment of Facebook is dominated by the female audience with over 61% or 7.6 million users. There are 4.9 million registered males, which is approximately 39%. The age of the majority of men and women registered is between 29 and 35.

Migration into mobile

Over the course of 2019, there has been an increasing trend among Facebook users to switch to mobile devices. More than 12.3 million users are already using this social network on their smartphones or tablet.

Network’s outreach exceeded that of The New York Times and Washington Post. The flagship page I love America received over 1 million likes. From the beginning of September, the public pages began publishing content supporting Donald Trump.

The story appeared in the headlines of the U.S. mainstream media: Washington Post, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Times wrote about it. In response to the public reaction, Facebook has blocked the pages. Initially, the social network claimed that they are in no violation of the standards, but when it was removing the pages it referred to the rule regarding fake content.

AIN.UA’s editor talked to the key figures in the story. Part of the interview recorded by AIN.UA’s editor was also published in Popular Information’s article.

Main figures

The only person whom it was initially possible to connect to I Love America was an Odesa native Andriy Zyuzikov. A website specified in the page’s description was registered in his name. In his comment to AIN.UA, he explained his role in the project.

According to Zuzikov, he merely helped the network at the initial stage. Zuzikov has nothing to do with its further promotion.

I helped at the initial state to tackle technical details of operation and monetization in Facebook. All the work in terms of promotion has been done by my colleague alone. He is a marketer that moved from brick and mortar to online.

And why does he publish posts about Trump? It is only because of their virality. He tested multiple topics: animals, humor, citations, patriotism, and politics. Users from the U.S. best reacted to politics, so he began publishing content in this direction.

Zyuzikov noted that he is not familiar with the political narrative. Later he said that his ‘colleague’ is a Ukrainian national Andreii Tkachenko. In his conversation with the editor from Popular Information Zyuzikov said that he and his partner developed different views because of the political nature of the content. 

I realized that sooner or later an editor like you would show up who would write about the Facebook page in a negative light. And I was right. And you are also right. Such pages should not exist on the Internet.

AIN.UA talked to Andreii Tkachenko. He admitted that he was behind the network of public pages and called it an ‘American farm.’ Below are quotations from a conversation with Tkachenko, which are slightly edited for clarity of narrative and explanation of AIN.UA’s editor.

Who is behind the farm

Tkachenko said that the farm is one of incidental projects of his company IQFormat OÜ. The business is run by three persons remotely.

Our company is called IQFormat OÜ and is registered in the European Union. It has no representation in Ukraine. We help administrators to run businesses in social media and monetize their communities. 

AIN.UA found the company. IQFormat OÜ LLC was registered in Estonia back in 2016. Its registered capital is 2,550 Euro. Its registered activity is information technology and computers. Currently, its members of the board include Andriy Zyuzikov and Anatoliy Zaitsev. Until April 2019 the same role had Simran Niftaliev. AIN.UA editors were not able to establish a legal connection between Andreii Tkachenko and QFormat OÜ or any other Estonian company.

Andriy Zyuzikov’s curriculum vitae also says that he has been CEO at IQFormat OU since October 2016. His page in LinkedIn says that the company creates networks of Facebook pages for promotion of clients. Currently, they boast over 5 million subscribers. Also, IQFormat OU does video branding and creates web-services for SMM. 

Here is their complete list:

• FBpartner.club/en
• FBstatistics.com/en
• ContentMoney.com
• VideoReact.com
• FeedSpy.net.

Andreii Tkachenko’s profile is available in LinkedIn. He is specified as a co-founder of IQ Format since April 2015. 

In his conversation with the editor from AIN.UA Tkachenko mentioned two social services that bring him main revenue:

Our key business is traffic monetization services for Facebook administrators. Not everyone wants to configure their websites to direct the traffic there.

For instance, Content Money allows administrators to publish articles with unique UTM markers and get up to 70% of funds earned on advertisement. We take the remaining amount and share it with authors. The content is exclusively from entertainment domain, not a political one.

Our other project, Facebook Page post Exchange website, allows administrators promote pages without using advertisement. They can find partners in social media and exchange posts. This way one can efficiently increase engagement and grow audience.

This is where we get our primary income from and this is where we apply our most effort. All this is legal, and we do not deal with the ‘black’ content out of principle.

How the content segment emerged

Farms are incidental business of the company. Tkachenko initially organized a network of public pages targeting Russian-speaking audience, which attracted about 6 million subscribers. Then he realized that it is a promising niche, which is well worth investing into.

That was the beginning of a network of American public pages:

The second farm is an American farm. Foreign direction appeared in 2017 and was rather a hobby, out of curiosity. I became interested in a new, high market. So we tested out our offer. Of course, we invested a little for the start and bought some traffic.

But we are not millionaires, our investments were humble. Far from a million dollars, like with Znaj.ua. Moreover, I know the extent of how Facebook is geared to get the money. If you overdo with monetization, you will not get organic growth.

Tkachenko explained the selection of topics by the absence of negativity and relatability. He mentioned a few times that he does not work with problematic content:

We would select a simple and understandable to us content that we used in our work. All the topics were relatable. Jesus because I am a religious person myself; funny animals because my daughter loves them; patriotism because I relate to it. 

Tkachenko refuted claims about coordinated information attack or attempts to influence American elections. He said that he was not trying to deceive the audience:

We have never pretended to be Americans. In the page description, everybody could check from where are its administrators. No political party or lobbyist hired us to do it.

Our principle is as follows: “We do not analyze tastes, we analyze numbers.”

American farm grew fast and soon the number of public pages exceeded one hundred. It is because of the diligent work with the content and audience, the entrepreneur explained:

This social network really values the indictor of the originality of the content. Complete copying is not welcome, while partially tweaked content is admissible. Usually, you need to edit 15%-20% of the material. That is what we did. For instance, we would slightly change an image or think up an inscription.

How the farm worked

Tkachenko shared the details of the farm’s operation. The entire American direction was managed by a mere 3 administrators. They would update 20-30 pages daily and worked virtually in an automatic mode. The content itself was of a secondary concern, the first place was always the virality of it.

We had internal services that would collect viral content from all over the social network and provide relevant tips. For instance, it would demonstrate the most popular comment along with the post. This way we were able to understand what tone should be given to the post.

The content would go into the database. From there the farm administrators would pick it and slightly change it. For example, they would think up inscriptions. There was also a database of freelancers who would check the basic legibility of inscriptions for a nominal fee to avoid clearly laughable mistakes.

The administrators did not even know English. Usually, they would simply take images, for example, about veterans, and write a slogan like “God bless America!”

One of the administrators was a 13-year-old daughter of Tkachenko. The child was in charge of public pages featuring cute animals. The entrepreneur is confident that this experience would help her in adult life and he sees the future in social media. He says that he would be happy to organize an educational project for youth to learn how to work with Facebook.

The notorious page I Love America had another administrator:

The other administrator was a senior disabled lady, Ludmila. I taught her everything from the beginning. I hired her based on the recommendation of my wife: in her childhood, Ludmila treated her well and helped her in difficult life situations. And now Ludmila is very sick. She has serious problems with legs, her relatives gave up on her and she found herself helpless. That was Ludmila who primarily handled I Love America. Believe me, when the public page was blocked she was very anxious. She thought that she made some kind of a mistake or missed something.

How and why political content emerged

We became interested in political content a few months ago. Algorithms began to suggest that users actively interact with such publications. In parallel, the team began to be bombarded with suspicious offers:

They wanted to bribe us – both the Democrats and the Republicans. They wrote from fake accounts, offered significant amounts. I am sure that a professional team was behind this campaign.

Testimony of Tkachenko and Zyuzikov concur on the matter of Trump — he was elected because he is popular.

We chose to write about Trump based exclusively on numbers. It was stupid not to publish anything as it is a hot topic in the U.S. We saw that and decided not to ignore that.

There is also the Trump 2020 direction. But is that really bad? Isn’t the U.S. president an objective reality? We started publishing because the algorithm showed a hot niche. That’s the whole story. 

Publications that included Trump were extremely popular, collecting 100,000 reactions per post. We also tried to monetize the topic, first through the placement of affiliate links, which redirected to merchandize in his support. 

The main focus was not on political content, says Tkachenko. We tried to pick posts about his family, grandchildren, or simply patriotic slogans. 

How the monetization was done

Tkachenko repeatedly indicated that they monetized the American network a wee bit and only in test mode. 

We just checked from time to time what works and what doesn’t. For example, we engaged our American partner and connected video ads. 

But no one was after the money. I considered the farm as an asset and the profit was measured by the growth of subscribers. Without an emphasis on earnings, it was significantly larger. After all, American users are very valuable. They are estimated at $ 100-150 per 1,000 people on the black market. Of course, we do not resell users.

According to him, if the team would actively begin to redirect the traffic to external resources and monetize the public pages, the organic outreach would collapse. This was not part of the plan.

I estimate my loss due to blocking at $ 1 million. In general, if we monetized everything in the maximum mode, we would earn up to $500,000 per month.

On accusations of disinformation

Tkachenko admitted that the quality of the content was not particularly monitored. The numbers were the key to everything. 

I will not be economical with the truth. Perhaps somewhere there were erroneous materials. But we deleted them. Each news outlet publishes false content. This is completely normal. We deleted our mistakes. Likewise, the mass media corrects their texts. If 1-2 posts were objectively incorrect, then keep in mind that a total of about 12,000 posts were posted.

Examples of publications provided by the Popular Information outlet and verified by the editor from AIN.UA do indeed often contain false statements. Among these, for example, posts about Hillary Clinton. There were also posts that were used by the “Russian trolls” in the past.

Tkachenko says that there was no desire to offend someone’s feelings or instructions to follow orders. However, with the beginning of a political activity, they began facing problems anyway.

About a month ago, an American farm began to face issues. Facebook support began verifications. And those were not really verifications. At first, they blocked public pages, and then we would prove our own innocence. Honestly, we grew tired of taking photos of our passports and send them to moderators.

In the end, the verification went well. Tkachenko is confident that this is why the first reaction of Facebook to the request for blocking was negative. Then the social network told reporters that it did not find signs of misconduct:

I think that’s why Facebook reacted to the first request that way because before that they really didn’t find any violations.

Tkachenko is not going to abandon his assets. He will contact the moderators of Facebook and plans to defend the public pages. Although he recognizes that there is little chance of returning the assets:

I assess my chances of regaining access as zero to none. I buried this asset for myself. I understand that Facebook was forced to do it amid a public outcry. But it’s funny that after the publication of the whole story the number of subscribers to I Love America didn’t drop – people even continued to sign up and some sent greetings to Ukraine.

Three administrators are currently unemployed. The company’s work continues as before, with an emphasis on social services. 

What was before and how much it was possible to earn from that

On the eve of the 2016 U.S. elections, a similar story developed in Macedonia. Hundreds of viral public pages with manipulative content were managed from the local town of Veles, campaigning in favor of Donald Trump. They would redirect the traffic to websites that earned from ads.

At first, it was believed that the Macedonians only want to earn on attention to the elections. This version was published by Deutsche Welle in 2016. Here is a quote from one of the participants:

I needed something viral that people like to read, something of great interest in America. I’ve been following politics in the U.S. for 6 years and I saw an opportunity to make money.

Later, BuzzFeed News and international investigators pointed out other options. They established a connection between the Russian “troll factory” and Macedonian networks.

In 2015, shortly before the registration of the first Balkan sites, Russian Anna Bogacheva visited Macedonia. She is on the list of 13 Russians whom Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller accused of interfering in the 2016 U.S. elections.

The report, prepared by Global Disinformation, estimated the annual revenue from advertising on extremist and disinformation sites at $235 million.

It was possible to identify these accounts and groups as misinformation campaigns not due to the content, but due to behavioral analysis. According to the head of the cybersecurity policy of social networks Nathaniel Gleicher in a comment for Liga.net, the deleted accounts are connected with the Kyiv PR-agency Pragmatico.

As the press service of Facebook told AIN.UA, the people behind this activity used fake accounts to manage groups and pages, as well as to increase engagement, distribute content and direct people to external sites that impersonated news media. Administrators and page owners, as a rule, published data on celebrities, show business, sports, local and international news, political news (in particular, on elections in Ukraine), political candidates, and criticized public figures.

• The Kyiv company spent about $ 1.6 million on advertising, it managed to attract about 4.2 million followers in total, about 400,000 accounts joined the groups.
• Pages and groups were managed by fake accounts, their names were constantly being changed.
• These groups and accounts have been active during the recent election.
• Among the examples of deleted pages there were the accounts of the publishers Hyser, Znaj.ua, Politeka, which are now inaccessible.

The editors of AIN.UA contacted the press office of Facebook. Representatives of the social network said that the page violated the Community Standards.

This is a set of rules that provides security, opportunity to speak out, and fairness for all users. Mova repeatedly violated them:

The Community Standards are designed to keep people on Facebook safe and they prohibit things like bullying, harassment or hate speech. When a Page repeatedly posts content which violates these rules, as occurred here, then we unpublish the Page.

Facebook confirmed that the decision to block the page was final, the page will remain unpublished. More than 520,000 users followed Mova.

According to him, Kateryna is the media space expert, the speaker of all conferences on disinformation in recent years.

“We believe that this is the best choice that Facebook could make. This choice has been known for some time from unofficial sources… We hope that after this appointment, the rude and unprofessional attitude of Facebook to Ukraine and Ukrainians will finally stop,” he wrote.

Editors of AIN.UA awaiting Kateryna’s comment on her appointment and new responsibilities.

What made you leave?

Absence of large and fair product companies in Ukraine, and human anthills instead.

What do you mean by fair?

Ukraine, in essence, is an outsourcing business (i.e. you sell your time and you don’t get anything else beyond that sale). I wanted to work in a product company to understand what I do, to contribute to the result and share success (by owning shares, for instance). It is not an option in the outsourcing world. This is reason number one.

Secondly, I faced the following in Dnipro: even if you have money, it does not guarantee you a decent life. For example, with a monthly income of $300 to $2,000, you will still be living in a Stalin-era or panel building. Entryways are still gonna stink of piss, drunkards are still gonna roam the streets, you will still have to take jitneys and buy stale potatoes from ATB stores. And what about the elevator smell? As if a garbage truck is always parked down below.

Indeed, you can escape all that. You can drop jitneys and use a private car, you can move from a panel building to a private house, i.e. you can escape this life with money. But I wouldn’t want to earn money to escape life. And this was my main motivator.

It is important to note that living in Dnipro is difficult because of its ecology. You cannot drink tap water, instead, you have to buy water like in Africa and take it home, which is weird. And even if you drink good water, you will still have to wash with process water. A reasonable amount of money won’t save you from this, so I decided to stop feeling sore about it and move on.

Relocation to Amsterdam

How did you find work in Amsterdam? Did your company help you with documents and accommodation?

The situation with Amsterdam was super trivial. Back then I worked at IDE Group, then I left to work at Ciklum, and there I had to work with a Dutch client. Officially, there was no relocation to Amsterdam. We used to spend there up to 90 days out of 180 as required by visa. The company rented a huge house for our team in a good neighborhood in Amsterdam. It was awesome.

Please share your perks and pitfalls in Amsterdam in terms of standard of living. We have interviewed a lot of people about their relocation experience, and people are often not quite happy after they relocate: they complain, for example, about the change of cuisine, high taxes, etc.

The main thing that changed in Amsterdam was that I was surrounded by people with the same level of income. In Amsterdam, a techie has about the same income as an accountant or doctor. There is no abysmal gap between the salaries of a developer and others, unlike in Ukraine.

What kind of income are we talking about?

A monthly income of 2,000 to 5,000 EUR.

Now about the cuisine. There are a plethora of food products in the Netherlands. In 2011, that is when I moved there, I found it unorthodox that almost all stores closed at 6 PM. I.e. by the time I left the office to pick up some food, grocery stores had already been closed. It makes you plan and stock up on food. Sure, there were no familiar food products, but we anticipated that. The country is 2,500 km away from Ukraine, so it would be unreasonable to expect beets to be sold everywhere. But every small town has a market where you can buy virtually anything. Surprisingly, it is almost impossible to buy fresh fish in the seaport city of Amsterdam. They simply do not eat it. There are only two small stores where fresh-frozen fish is sold.

Can you please tell the cost of rent, food, and transport?

I do not remember it well. My company covered the rent. By the end of the month after all the expenses I had 400-500 euros in my pocket, which was a good result. At that moment, eight years ago, 1,500 euros would rent you an apartment in a very good central neighborhood of Amsterdam. A two-story house with two bedrooms in Jordaan was 2,500 euros per month.

On life, work in Paris and France’s IT market

How come you changed job and country?

Amsterdam is a city of small companies. There are 2-3 behemoths, the likes of Booking.com, while the rest are 10-15-20-strong companies working on some kind of a tiny product. They mainly require JavaScript Seniors and application developers. I specialized in highload engineering, and there were not many options to explore.

In 2015, Criteo made an offer that included relocation to Paris. Back then the company was worth $2.4bln (NASDAQ:CRTO). I had an interview. We talked about their technical problems and tasks, career development, and decided to join the company because they offered more opportunities. I relocated in November 2015.

So you did not want to change the city, what about career prospects?

Yes. You need to understand that moving from Pavlohrad to Amsterdam is a leap while moving from Amsterdam to Paris is not that big of a difference. The water is still pure, medicine is free, education is still free and no one is pissing in entryways.

Did the company help you relocate?

The company paid for the entire relocation and visa process. I was moving under the Blue card, a program that allows labor migration for skilled professionals within the EU. I had a diploma in engineering, 6 or 8 years of experience, and there were not that many people in France with my specialty. I had a work visa for 3 years.

The company gave me an apartment in a posh district of Paris, Marais, for the period of half a year. There was a dedicated employee who handled the enrollment of my son in the school, registration of all the necessary document with banks and other integration into French red tape. This person helped me find accommodation. Also, after relocation, I was assigned an accountant who helped me with taxes.

Is it difficult to handle the paperwork yourself?

It would be the same if a Frenchman handled his paperwork in Ukraine. The chances are zero if you do not know the language. If you know French – it is pretty easy if you have a complete guide of what to do, just google it and ask people. You can hire a consultant for a couple of hundred euros, who will develop an action plan.

For the record, getting a French passport is not that difficult. You need to live here for 7 years, take language exam, show that you paid your taxes in time and did not violate traffic rules. Take culture exam (who’s the prime minister, constitution trivia, how much is fromage in Normandy). And the passport is yours.

Can you comment on the news about IT visas to France? What will this give the country and will it facilitate the relocation of Ukrainian specialists?

Gradually facilitating the migration of skilled labor is a trend of the past 8 years in France and the course of the incumbent president. I will explain the details.

Part one. Problems on the local labor market

The French have their own peculiarities on the labor market.

For instance, you cannot fire people. If an employee comes at work sober and tries to do everything he/she can, not everything he/she is asked to do, it is very expensive to fire him/her. Until the recent labor code reform, there was no restriction on employee compensation in the event of dismissal “for no reason” or redundancy. The amount of compensation could equal a few years’ salaries of the employee.

Common practice: the person was simply paid and he did not go to work so that he would not interfere. Or they were given such a boring job that the person would leave. In other words, in France, it is easier to get a divorce from a wife than to dismiss an employee.

With the last labor reform, the process of getting rid of employees was facilitated, a limit was imposed on the amount of compensation for dismissal, and the bankruptcy procedure and redundancy were facilitated.

Part two. Migration

In France, there is a natural migration: residents of different islands and several African countries are moving to live permanently in France. They are French too. Great guys, they speak French fluently, they integrate easily, they easily find work, but there are not so many professionals of any kind among them and they can be a little abusive of the social system of France.

At the same time, professional immigration was difficult. In order to balance this state of affairs, France slightly untightened the tap of skilled labor migration.

Speaking of the social system and support: if you lose your job, the state just takes complete care of you and can pay you up to 80% of your monthly salary. The state pays for education/retraining, it can help with the payment for housing. No one will be left without help. There is even a saying: to be happy as God is happy in France.

France is about a happy life.

Part three. Education

Historically, France has good engineers thanks to a good education. Not senior JavaScript developers, but those engineers who design aircrafts/missiles/bridges/supercomputers. In addition, France has an outstanding mathematics education. Probably half of all the prominent mathematicians are French. Facebook, Google, and a dozen more similar companies have R&D offices in France with a focus on research and mathematics.

Suddenly, France experienced a collapse of small enterprises. If an enterprise grows in an intensive way (using its own resources) – it simply cannot afford to hire many local employees, and the locals are not too eager to participate in something temporary. The average employee turnover in France is about 7 years. French rarely change jobs. The locals do not rush to join yet another startup, such as a laser toy for cats or pants for birds due to the small chances for the long term employment. Demand creates supply, and France lowers the threshold for entry of skilled labor immigrants to the level of JavaScript signors to secure its labor market.

Were there any adaptation subtleties or difficulties?

The biggest sticking point was the language. The French reluctantly speak French to you if you do not have a good grasp of the language. English is out of the question. The first year was very hard, we felt socially isolated. France is a more or less national state, and I felt this being a newcomer. Things got better when I learned the language.

I will say a few words about culture, this is important. There is no culture in Silicon Valley, there is a courtesy. There is also little culture in London because less than a third of its population are British. France, on the other hand, has retained its culture, it is huge and all-encompassing, and it is hard to understand it without knowing the language.

You need to know how to bite a baguette, how to cut cheese, what happened in 1965 and where Sartre lived. Otherwise, you are an ill-mannered stranger, despite your iPhone and an ironed shirt. A stranger who can offend his colleagues with a greasy joke, by rear voice, or the primordially Eastern European habit of demonstrating dominance even in trifle things, is destined to fail the probationary period in France. He will be avoided by the French ladies. He will not be given a good piece of meat in the local butcher shop. And he will have to buy oysters at double the price. In other words, if you are going to France – do not be assholes.

That is why many young men who have decided not to learn the language and culture, return from Paris back to the zone of an ecological disaster in the first year. Those who have mastered the language and lived here for 3-5 years, learn to congratulate the butcher and concierge on holidays with the help of postcards and wine and eventually adapt.

Language courses four times a week and all available information about French cinema and French literature helped a lot.

Those who have successfully adapted, often still leave, after estimating retirement prospects for the next 40 years.

I was also upset about taxes – at first glance, they are not very obvious.

Can you tell about that in detail?

Before signing the contract, I asked how much tax I would have to pay. I was explained that the tax burden depends on experience, length of service, and field of work, but on average one should expect 25-45% of salary.

And here I get my first salary minus 30%. And then I get a tax notification telling me that it’s time to pay taxes. It was shocking. It turned out that social benefits are paid from the salary, but they are not tax deductible. And the tax I inquired about is an income tax, payable for the previous year.

Now, this system in France has been rewired, and from this year on it has become like in London or in Ukraine: you get the money less all applicable taxes.

Please tell more about salaries and intricacies of working in French IT.

In general, salaries in IT here are ranging from 45,000 to 150,000 euros per year. They provide shares too, though not much, in the amount of 20-50,000 euros per year (restricted stock units, RSU) and they are issued on the basis of the average cost as of the month of payment. You can cash out shares gradually over 1-4 years, but they give them out every year. In other words, on average, after a couple of years working in a corporation, the salary increases by 20-50-70,000 euros per year. The tax is progressive and is levied from anything: from the sale, from purchase, from thin air. The French model sounds like this: you will have everything except money. Because why do you need money when you have everything?

What it looks like.

French offices will gladly send you to all possible conferences, pay for your commute, enforce a 35-hour working week and two months of vacation a year. You will always have enough money for wine, cheese, shoes, and housing. But that is the trick. You will almost have no cash.

You also need to understand that by working here, you need to extend the visa every 1-2 years. An employer is involved in this process. They may not have time to help and the worker will be forced to leave the country. If you are already working in France, finding a new place is easy enough. But, in view of the culture of dismissals, recommendations are the main selection criteria. If Jean-Paul calls a stranger, Francois, and he will tell him that Mykola did cut the cheese with a knife the wrong way – Jean-Paul will not hire Mykola.

Another problem is that in France it is almost impossible to save money for retirement. And to get a public pension, you need to work for 40 years. And you, for example, do not want to be a 65-year-old developer, and only by the age of 55 you will be able to repay the mortgage. Own business is an option so complex that they try not to even talk about it. Therefore, I thought about relocating again.

On life in London and work at Facebook

How did you get into Facebook?

I negotiated with several companies, including Facebook and Google. My plan was to save enough money to buy a house in France or anywhere else, and move back. That is, I did not plan to stay in London.

They were looking for a production engineer among my peers, and I was engaged in Real-time data processing (Apache Kafka and several streaming systems). I was well versed in this, often spoke at thematic conferences. Once I was a speaker at a conference in San Francisco regarding Apache Kafka, and from that moment on, they wanted me in Google, Facebook, and 5 or 6 other companies.

In other words, if you want to get on the radar of Facebook or Google, you need to speak at thematic conferences?

Big companies rarely hire people simply because they are very good at JavaScript. They don’t even ask what kind of technology you are good at or what you program because when hired you will need to write code on everything. In most cases, they are looking for engineers.

When you say that they are on the lookout for engineers, what kind of specialists do you mean?

I would say that an engineer in computer science is a person that relatively understands how a computer works, and how to work with it. The masters of VM, browser, One Language wizards, and other outsourcing samurai may not be useful. In many large companies, most of the tools are their own. Even programming languages.

Can you tell us about your interview at Facebook?

In almost all large technology companies, an interview looks about the same for all the candidates. First, HR calls and asks a huge number of simple and clear questions. For example, when the guys from Google call, they simply compare what you have in your CV with what you actually know. They may ask: “Tell approximately, what is the value of 2 raised to the power of 26?” And you must answer with a certain accuracy. If you worked with data, then you can imagine the kind or size of this number.

You are asked a lot of technical questions, and if you are not working in this domain, you will not be able to answer them. After the first screening, 2-3 remote interviews are conducted, which, as a rule, are devoted to programming, algorithms, system design and computer systems.

Then they arrange for an inside interview at the company’s office. There could be up to five interviews per day. Then, everyone who interviewed you writes feedback and, using internal algorithms, companies decide whether you are a good fit or not.

I would say that Cracking the coding interview, written by a former employee of Google, is very helpful in preparing for such interviews.

Tell us about your relocation and life in London? Can you compare it to Paris and Amsterdam?

Comparing these cities and countries can only be very subjective. If only because Amsterdam in 2011 is not the same as it is now. In Paris, after the attacks, there are still security guards at the entrances to all stores and they check bags. London is crazy about Brexit. Well, even I am not the same I was back in 2011.

I will share what I felt.

Amsterdam seemed to me very calm. The entire Amsterdam hustle is neatly concentrated in several tourist quarters, beyond which flows most ordinary life. There you could skip learning the language because everyone around you speaks English fluently enough, and as a rule – better than you. In Amsterdam, I learned that:

• You can live 150 km from the office and take a train to work.

• Buying good meat needs planning.
• Parking can cost 5 euros per hour and this is not a joke.
• Your MasterCard and Visa are useless in supermarkets (although things improved).
• Bikes come and go. But mostly go.
• In pubs, they serve beer in a juice glass at the price of a pint
• Wherever you go – a humid wind will blow in your face.
• You can ride a bike in the snow.
• The sun is so rare that you can skip work on that day.
• You will have to live in the social bubble of immigrants and colleagues.
• You need to plan shopping, income, and expenses six months ahead.

Amsterdam was understandable and affordable. It was safe to settle there, save up and plant a tree. By that moment, I already had a family, and the desire of something more, multiplied by the inner question “Is this it?”

During the time between the two companies, we spent almost all of the money we saved (it was easy). We moved to Paris on a rainy autumn day with a couple of hundred euros in our pockets.

The first couple of months were full of stress. Looking back, I think the reason for the stress was a lack of language and trust in others. But we quickly got used to the environment and learned that:

• No two baguettes are alike.
• Language is the key to culture.
• All rules, laws, and regulations are pas grave (not serious, uncritical).
• All the rules, laws and regulations that may negatively affect you ― c’est grave.
• There is no bureaucracy in Ukraine and the Netherlands (compared to France).
• Learned what appellation And there are almost five hundred of them here. Distribute energy intelligently. Plan.
• Tickets to cinemas and small theaters – without assigned seats. The one who spends more time in the queue gets the spoils.
• Your colleague may turn out to be a cyclist, rally driver, pilot, speak 8 languages, an aristocrat, an IPv6 author, a cheese-eater and a cheese-maker, anyone. And that is because work is just work, and besides it there is life, and it has to be lived.
• Paying with paper checks is really convenient.
• 2 months of vacation a year is more difficult to take than it might seem.
• Everyone is on vacation in August. Restaurants, cafes, and stores will have an inscription: on vacation until the end of August.
• Zero tolerance to social injustice.
• Your butcher and baker are the keys to the local community.
• Streets are mostly for aimless pleasant strolls.

3 years later we moved to London. There were no serious reasons, apart from the job offer, it seemed that we would save more, plus we’d learn another culture. Main impressions of the first 8 months:

• The cost of travel can be a reason not to go anywhere. Guests might just not come.
• The number of people on the street may be the reason not to go anywhere.
• Culture can be replaced by courtesy.
• Cask ale is the best.
• You cannot talk or look in the tube. You cannot do anything, just enjoy the ride.
• There is a visa driven development in place. No job – no visa.
• France had a terrible red tape.
• Public office, an insurance company, a hospital can employ people who speak less English than you do.
• The paper press is very much alive.
• There are virtually no locals. Everyone is just like you.
• Wild foxes instead of wild dogs even in the city center. Parrots instead of sparrows. A stag can step on your foot in the park. But the pigeons are there.
• The weather was good in the Netherlands.
• Schools are really awesome.

So far so good.

How is it to work at Facebook? What do you do there?

Facebook is enormous, and everyone’s experience is different. For me, the main difference with my previous experience is a very individual work. As a rule, you work on your own projects, for which you are solely responsible.

There’s no teamwork, no agile or scram. You manage your time, work and your projects. At the same time, the team can self-organize and use any of the convenient methodologies, everything is very flexible, and you can try to reach an agreement on anything.

Such individualism is good because you are fully concentrated, no one takes your attention away. However, it is bad for the same reasons. All others are also focused on their affairs. To get help, you need to make an effort. Others can, but are not obliged to help you, everyone has different goals, and you need to convince them and interact with them. It can both annoy and develop. There are a huge number of introverts who like this mode of operation: they will be addressed with requests three times in half a year, and they will spend the rest of the time as if in a shell, solving all the issues on their own.

There are no loud corporate parties, nor there is squander: we cannot go to Bali for 2 weeks at the expense of the company; there is no such leave as in France; we do not have a limit of working hours, we work as long as it is necessary to complete your project. Sometimes it takes less time than usual, and sometimes more. So Facebook and the London office, in particular, is for those who can and want to work hard.

Can you share the salary bracket? Does Glassdoor have the numbers right?

I cannot. But I can say that they write the truth about this on the Internet. There is still a huge difference in wages in Europe and the U.S. As far as I know, all IT behemoths in the Valley, or Seattle, or London pay market salaries to their employees. In other words, the salary of employees of the same company in Europe and the U.S. can be very different, even twice as little or big within the same team distributed all over the globe.

Over the past year, Facebook has repeatedly found itself at the center of multiple conflicts. Did it affect your job?

I cannot comment on it.

Are there any restrictions because of where you work? For example, your Facebook profile is closed…

Nothing out of the ordinary. As in most companies, I cannot publicly comment on any internal affairs and present my point of view as my company’s point of view without prior consent. Similar restrictions are all over the place, it’s a standard procedure.

How would you rate your overall work experience at Facebook? Are you going to change the job? What are your plans for the future??

Working here is not easy. But it motivates a huge number of super talented people around. Also, now I begin to understand the headings like “X generation founded Y”: such an individual approach to work promotes excellent entrepreneurial skills. I don’t seriously think about changing the job or country, but at the same time, I really miss France. So maybe sooner or later we will go back there.

Facebook is the most popular social network in Ukraine in terms of average daily and average monthly activity. The service is ahead of VKontakte, Instagram and Odnoklassniki.

Ukraine is among the leaders in the growth of popularity of the social network. The Ukrainian Facebook audience grew by 1 million people in the fourth quarter of 2018. This is the third figure in the world after India and the Philippines. In total, about 3 million Ukrainians have registered on Facebook over the past year.

Most Ukrainian Facebook users live in Kyiv, Lviv, and Uzhgorod. Least of all live in Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, and Zaporizhzhia. The authors of the study say: “Kyiv’s leadership is due to the fact that Facebook includes a large number of people who work in Kyiv living in nearby communities.”

In Ukraine, Facebook is most actively used from mobile devices. Nearly 9 million people log in to the social network only from a smartphone, 1.2 million do it exclusively through the desktop, and 3 million use both platforms.

Ukraine is one of the world’s leaders in the proportion of female users of Facebook. 59% of users of social networks in Ukraine are women, 41%, respectively, are men. If we talk about age, then Facebook is most popular among people from 25 to 35 years old (4.6 million users). Then there are Ukrainians of the category of 36-45 years (3 million), and then – a young audience of 18-24 years (2.1 million).

Other data:

• Every seventh Ukrainian user administers the page on Facebook. The most active are young people aged 18-24. In this age category, the administrator is every fifth.
• The most popular smartphone brands among Ukrainian users are Samsung (3.9 million), Xiaomi (2.7 million) and iPhone (2.5 million).
• A “typical” Ukrainian user on Facebook for 30 days shares one post, leaves two comments and click the “like” button nine times. At the same time, Ukrainians press 13 times for advertising posts in 30 days on average, while the average indicates in the world is 8 times.

“Facebook deleted two of my posts. I thought maybe those were the ones where I did not hold back and wrote some bad words during yesterday’s Verkhovna Rada’s meeting, but I was wrong. These posts concerned Russian aggression against Ukraine. Of course, I sent them back for a second check,” writes the deputy general director of Ukrinform, Maryna Singayiskaya, who is quoted by the news agency.

“I added two hashtags #RussiaAttacksUkraine and #StopRussianAggression. And what do you think have happened? Facebook decided to remove my post after 3 hours,” recalls Anastasia Tymofiiva, a volunteer. It seems that my two sentences really hurt the reputation of “my favorite social network.”

Among the removed content was an interview with Russian political analyst Liliya Shevtsova, who is a critic of the current political system in Russia, two other blocked posts turned out to be news about the attack and seizure of Ukrainian ships by Russians. There were the words of the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Pavel Klimkin quoted about “an absolutely new level of provocation and aggression” and about the desire of the Russian Federation to seize the Sea of ​​Azov. Other news concerned the statement by the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine that the Russian Federation was pulling troops closer to the Ukrainian border.

Media lawyer Igor Roskladay appealed to Facebook administration regarding the blocked content.

“I reported about the strange blockings… And actually, Facebook reacted pretty quickly. It looked like some posts for some reason were marked as spam. There may be two reasons. First one is a technical failure, however, it seemed strange to me that three publications that dealt with Russia were removed simultaneously. And I have some suspicions, but it is impossible to confirm them now, because Facebook does not always explain the reasons for the posts’ blockage in detail,” he told in the commentary to the publication.

The Ministry of Information Policy of Ukraine has already prepared a complaint to the administration of the social network about these blockages. The ministry believes that blockings are the result of “malicious use of the network by stakeholders or a system error in content rating algorithms.” The ministry also recorded bots’ attacks spreading fakes about martial law.