The Russian disinformation network “Matryoshka” has launched a new campaign on the Bluesky social network. Eliot Higgins, founder of the investigative journalism group Bellingcat, has been one of the first researchers to detect its activity. So far, four Russian-made fake videos have been identified on the platform.
Each disinformation video begins with a real person — a professor, a student from a top university, or a recognized expert — introducing themselves and beginning to speak on a topic unrelated to Russia’s war in Ukraine. The footage then transitions to segments that do not show the speaker on screen — while what sounds like their voice continues narrating. In these moments, the speaker seems to promote claims that the West should end its support for Ukraine, that Europe should align its future with Russia, and that Volodymyr Zelensky is a dictator — or even a vampire.
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The videos circulating on Bluesky had previously appeared on X, according to the Bot Blocker project (@antibot4navalny), which first uncovered and detailed the workings of the Matryoshka network in early 2024.
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Oh, didn’t know it had a name.
I used to call it propaganda or mass communication asymmetry. It also kind of falls short in the “order of magnitude” part. A newspaper publication takes many orders of magnitude more effort to refute than to spread. Memes require even more orders of magnitude.
Makes sense then.