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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Man no one likes twitter anymore
guessing that they aren’t migrating but rather expanding to try to reach those who have left the intern’s service.
Turns out when you purposefully let it become infested with bots and make the system of proving who is real and who is fake confusing and backwards, it becomes known for that and slowly becomes useless to even the bot peddlers as more people leave and more bots arrive.
The bots are for people, not for other bots. So, if the bot to human ratio is skewed, they have to leave to where humans might actually see their disinformation.
Further, the kind of people that they need to see the disinformation aren’t the rubes who are still somehow on Xitter and are easily influenced by it. Those people are already captured and need less effort put into keeping them captured. (Not to imply the only people left on Xitter are all captured MAGAs, but they’re clearly the majority of what’s left of the human userbase at this point)