Over the subsequent couple of days after information of Navalny’s dying, Solovyov shared extra content material designed to recommend Navalnaya was having an affair, together with a doctored picture that appeared to indicate Navalnaya embracing Russian entrepreneur Evgeny Chichvarkin, who prior to now has financed Navalny’s work.
The unique picture, taken in 2013, reveals Navalnaya embracing her husband after he was launched from jail. The doctored picture has been in circulation for a number of years, with Reset’s researchers discovering examples of it being shared on-line in 2021. The faux picture has been extensively debunked by fact-checkers.
Within the wake of Navalny’s dying, nonetheless, the picture has taken on a brand new life and has been shared extensively on X, the place it has been considered nicely over 1,000,000 instances, and on Fb, Instagram, and YouTube, in addition to on Russian social media platform Vkontakte. It has additionally been used on many Russian blogs and web sites that amplify pro-Kremlin disinformation in a number of European languages.
A non-fake picture, displaying Navalnaya standing alongside Chichvarkin on a seaside, can be being shared to assist the false declare that the pair are having an affair.
Navalnaya, who has additionally stated she was completely satisfied to be a politician’s spouse slightly than a politician, was thrust onto the world stage within the wake of her husband’s dying, and inside hours of his dying being introduced, she spoke on the extremely influential Munich Safety Convention. Final week, she spoke with EU leaders earlier than jetting to San Francisco the place she met with US president Joe Biden.
International recognition got here with some points. Her X account, which she created final week, was suspended when the platform’s automated programs triggered an alert after Navalnaya amassed 100,000 followers within the house of simply three days. As she struggled to get well her account, others on the platforms had been in search of to undermine her marketing campaign to get justice for her husband by sharing a video that claimed Navalnaya was faking her grief over her husband’s dying..
The faux video was branded with the emblem of the American Psychological Affiliation (APA) and featured footage of US psychologist Paul Ekman, who wrote the bestselling e-book Tips on how to Inform if Somebody Is Mendacity. The video, which appears prefer it was taken from the Instagram tales of the official APA account, attributes a press release to Ekman that Navalnaya’s grief for her husband’s dying is simulated. Nonetheless, no such video exists on the group’s social media profiles or its web site. A spokesperson for Ekman subsequently instructed an impartial Russian information outlet that his work “doesn’t embrace session on private, authorized, or political issues.”
Additionally on X, accounts linked to the Matryoshka affect marketing campaign, which targets journalists and fact-checking organizations and was uncovered earlier this yr by the Antibot4Navalny researchers. Accounts which have been linked to this group have been posting movies claiming that Navalnaya had an abortion final month.
One account reviewed by WIRED that’s a part of this marketing campaign responded to dozens of posts on X by information organizations in Europe and America by embedding the identical faux video and making the identical remark: “Yulia Navalnaya had an abortion in January 2024 at a non-public German clinic.” None of which is true.
