From Prohibition to Overload: Data Closure, Digital Propaganda, and the Typology of Restrictions on Access to Information in Ukraine, 2022–2026

Abstract

Objectives. Digital platforms, artificial intelligence, and algorithmic systems increasingly shape informational reality, while demand for verifiable information grows. The article combines conceptual analysis with an empirical test. Its theoretical part examines the forms of digital control over information – direct censorship, digital propaganda, information overload, and the closure of public data and platform APIs – and proposes a common framework for describing them through four shared parameters – actor, formal basis, visibility, and affected link. Whether these forms share a common logic is treated here as an open question rather than an assumption, and is tested against documented material. The empirical part determines the parameters along which active restrictions, which add content, and passive ones, which withdraw it, differ and converge, and which links of the citizen's informational capacity each of them affects. Method. Structured documentary analysis of a corpus of 29 documented restriction events in Ukraine between 24 February 2022 and 5 September 2026, drawn from normative acts, monitoring reports, platform announcements, and specialized media. The unit of analysis is a single restriction event, coded on eight parameters; both authors coded the corpus independently, with intercoder agreement of κ = .71–1.00 (M = .93). Results. Content removal does not occur as a primary type. Of the four parameters, only two vary independently: the actor predicts the formal basis in 24 of 27 events and visibility in 18, so basis and visibility behave largely as properties of the actor; concealed restrictions occur only among external actors. Most restrictions affect two links at once, production and verification. No state restriction was lifted in full. Conclusions. Active and passive restrictions converge in form but diverge in consequence: what differs is not the technique but the actor, the duration of the restriction, and whether a procedure for restoration exists. Artificial intelligence emerges not as a separate mechanism but as infrastructure that scales existing ones. Verification is affected in the great majority of cases in the corpus; data journalism, which rests on it, is vulnerable to the very restrictions it counters. Informational sovereignty – the citizen’s ability to obtain, verify, and interpret data independently of state, platform, and media intermediaries – is proposed as a framework for studying freedom of speech, freedom of data, and the capacity for verification.