PHANTOM PILLARS OF PRO-KREMLIN DISINFORMATION: A CASE STUDY OF RUSSIAN JOURNALISTS COVERING THE TOPIC OF WAR IN UKRAINE
PHANTOM PILLARS OF PRO-KREMLIN DISINFORMATION: A CASE STUDY OF RUSSIAN JOURNALISTS COVERING THE TOPIC OF WAR IN UKRAINE

Author(s): Jakub Kubś, Aleksandra Michałowska, Viktoras Daukšas
Subject(s): Media studies, Government/Political systems, Politics and communication, Peace and Conflict Studies, Russian Aggression against Ukraine
Published by: NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence
Keywords: War in Ukraine presented in Russian media; Kremlin; disinformation; Russian journalism;
Summary/Abstract: An analysis of the profiles of 27 Russian journalists who have published the largest number of articles about the war in Ukraine reveals serious doubts if those people even exist in real life. In the case of the Lenta.ru outlet, the investigation revealed the use of generative adversarial network (GAN) generated images as profile pictures of the journalists. Most of the authors could not be identified due to the lack of confirmed information about them, both on the agency’s websites and on the web in general. In the case of most of the journalists analysed, serious doubts about their credibility were raised, prompted by an unusually high number of daily publications and timestamps, i.e., very short intervals between consecutive content pieces. In some instances performance outpaced the human capabilities of the writer, suggesting that the journalistic profile is a sock puppet for a group of writers or an automated bot. It is also interesting to note the common practice in Russian outlets to remove names from visible parts of the article, but still leave the author in ‘front-end source’ code. One of the possible explanations for this is that real people prefer not to be identified with the content they spread.

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