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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.
The videos are published alongside phrases like “Do you think that’s true?” or “You can confirm or deny this information, can’t you?” accompanied by tags of well-known media outlets and fact-checkers. They are then reposted by hundreds of other accounts. The number of shares reach the hundreds on X (formerly Twitter), while on the newer Bluesky, reposts remain low — the most widely shared video has so far garnered 288 reposts, and another just four.
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.
This month, The Insider and Bot Blocker reported on a similar campaign in which anti-Ukrainian narratives were presented as coming from professors affiliated with globally renowned institutions — including Harvard University and the University of Cambridge. The professors’ voices were replicated using artificial intelligence (AI) tools — a fact that was verified by the University of Bristol, which at The Insider’s request analyzed a video featuring Ronald Hutton, a prominent British historian and faculty member.
“Twitter has more or less learned to suppress posts like these; only a small number of users actually ‘see’ them,” explains Bot Blocker, adding that “Bluesky hasn’t learned this yet — fact-checkers and the audience there are more vulnerable.”
The Russian disinformation campaign is expected to gain further traction on Bluesky. While the platform’s audience remains far smaller than that of X — Bluesky’s numbers stand at 25 million users compared to X’s 335 million monthly active users — Bluesky has seen a surge in migration in recent months. This trend has been driven largely by Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election and Elon Musk’s controversial “reforms” that introduced unpopular changes to the platform he now owns.
A week after the election, Bluesky became the top-ranked app in the U.S. App Store and repeated the feat in the UK one day later.In just two weeks in November, the app’s active user base in the U.S. increased by 519%, while its growth in Britain rose by 352%.