Russian propagandist media are working overtime disseminating all manner of fake stories about Ukraine’s preparation for hosting the 2017 Eurovision song contest. The newest mendacious tale is a claim that Kyiv is removing its homeless from the streets of the capital before the start of the contest. Lenta.ru, NTV, Komsomolskaya Pravda, Tsargrad and others literally had a field day with this fake. It all began when the Ukrainian news site…
Ukraine has no money to conduct the 2017 Eurovision song contest, Russian Defense Ministry television channel Zvezda declared this week, citing Ukraine’s Culture Minister Yevhen Nyshchuk as its source, who allegedly said Ukraine had no money and proposed that European investors chip in and help. Ukraine’s supposed inability to organize and finance this year’s Eurovision is a favorite Russian disinformation topic that was launched almost immediately after Ukraine’s Jamala won…
German media are against holding the 2017 Eurovision Song contest in Kyiv, declared the Russian news site Politexpert at the end of February. Written by Artem Kolchyn, the story does not cite an actual German publication nor does it link to any article and offers no direct or indirect quotes to support the author’s claim. Kolchyn also sweepingly asserts that Europe doesn’t want the annual song contest to be held…
Russian media are gleefully disseminating a fake story originally featured by the Ukrainian publication Vesti claiming that residents of Kyiv will be paying more for electricity in order to finance the Eurovision 2017 song contest that the Ukrainian capital is hosting in May. Meanwhile the Kyiv city administration announced at the end of January that city residents would not be called on to finance the international contest and any information…
At the end of January the Eurovision Song Contest’s official German language site published a story claiming that Kyiv authorities were planning a massive culling of stray dogs in the Ukrainian capital before the May 2017 song contest. The article includes petitions addressed to Eurovision organizer, the European Broadcasting Union and to Kyiv mayor Vitaliy Klitschko calling on them to stop the inhumane killing of street dogs. The article claims…
Russia’s television station Dozhd has joined the chorus of Russian media speculating about the possibility of the 2017 Eurovision Song Contest being held in Moscow instead of Kyiv. StopFake has already debunked similar claims in September. This time Russian media use an article from the German tabloid Bild as their source in which the organization administering Eurovision, the European Broadcasting council, allegedly does not rule out the possibility of next…
Russian website Ukraina.ru ran a story about Ukraine’s preparation for the 2017 Eurovision song contest in which it implied that Kyiv is soliciting funds for the event and going around the world with an extended hand. Using a Russian idiom «c миру по нитке» which literally means collecting thread the world over to make a shirt for a naked man, the publication cites the deputy director of Ukraine’s National Television…
By EU vs Disinfo What a year it’s been! 2018 will go down as the year NASA successfully landed a probe on Mars, Norway won a record of 39 medals at the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics and the EU raised the possibility of harmonising summertime and wintertime. But the year was also filled with some extraordinary events and mind-blowing crises that did nothappen, no matter how persistently pro-Kremlin media tried to convince…
This analytical report includes the results of research conducted by StopFake analysts based on archived data of debunked messages from Russian media. The StopFake project debunked over a thousand fake news stories about Ukraine in the first four years since it was launched. In this research, we present the results of quantitative analysis of fake news debunked by the StopFake team. Using content analysis, StopFake indexed collected materials by source…
By Sarah Hurst (@XSovietNews), for StopFake Some of the individuals tagged in tweets recently by Russian Mission UN (@RussiaUN), which has 31.1K followers, provide insight into who the Kremlin relies on to spread its propaganda message. They include well-known RT contributors and “independent bloggers”, as well as anonymous accounts or accounts with the name of a person whose identity can’t be verified. On a day when Twitter plans to remove…
