Fake debunking of fakes – how Russian propaganda hijacks the fact-checking news format

The supposedly Russian fact-checking Telegram channel “War on Fakes”, established on the day when Russia openly invaded Ukraine, has more than 700,000 followers. Its content has also been re-shared by prominent Russian figures such as the propagandist TV presenter Vladimir Solovyov, who himself has a more than a million-strong audience on the platform, as well as RT’s editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan and well-known war bloggers like Boris Rozhin, both of whom have hundreds of thousands of subscribers. The Russian Defence Ministry and other official government profiles also share the channel’s materials, as do many prominent anonymous channels, which recommend subscribing to “War on Fakes” as the channel that knows how to “successfully identify all liars and scoundrels”.

Although the channel is anonymous at first sight, in a recent investigation disinformation analytics company Logically linked it with the Russian media maker Timofey Vasiliev.

… and TV

This “fact-checking” approach, however, goes well beyond Telegram and it nowadays also flourishes on some of the most popular Russian TV channels.

Last March, the state-controlled Channel One launched a talk show programme Antifeyk (“Anti-fake”), which, five times a week for about half an hour, aims to “explain the fake news industry” (that is, non-Russian reporting) by bringing “experts” to the studio and talking about the “fakes” of the day.  

A couple of weeks later, the rolling news TV channel Rossiya 24 started a weekly 15-minute show Stopfeyk (“Stop fake”), which reportedly aims to “debunk Ukrainian propaganda”, by having one TV host presenting “fakes” to the audience. A similar format has also been adopted in August by the weekly show Feyk Kontrol (“Fake control”), hosted by the above-mentioned Timofey Vasiliev, which is nowadays streamed on Solovyov’s TV channel, Solovyov Live. 

These TV shows bear some similarities to the “documentaries” – programmes claiming to reveal the “actual truth” behind an event but that really just refurbish and create conspiracy theories – that have been broadcast by state and state-affiliated Russian media for years. “Fact checking” shows, though, focus more on the day-to-day agenda of the war.

Targeting foreign audiences

This supposedly “fact-checking” masking has been successfully applied to the domestic audience, but there have also been attempts to use it internationally for Russian propaganda purposes. Already a couple of years ago, Russia’s state broadcaster RT launched a website titled “FakeCheck”, in which it mixed some actual (although old) exposed fakes with biassed reporting. Russia’s Foreign Ministry launched a section on its website called “Unreliable publications”, where they debunked news that can’t be definitely called out as fakes. 

More recently, a new website was launched only a couple of days into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It is a sister version of the above-mentioned Telegram channel War on Fakes, only in English, French, Spanish, and Chinese (it also offers some stories in Arabic, but the page hasn’t been updated since last July). Updated a bit less often than the Russian Telegram channel, it still posts “debunking stories” at least a couple of times a week, and its content is also sometimes reshared by Russian official government accounts and other prominent social media accounts.

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