The fake Twitter account of “Marina Ovsyannikova”

I wish the article was more clear about what was real and what was fake.<p>In case anyone still isn&#x27;t sure: Marina Ovsyannikova did get on Russian state video, protesting against the war in Ukraine [1]. She has been detained [2]. Afterwards someone created a fake Twitter account @MarinaOvsyy , impersonating her.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Marina_Ovsyannikova#Anti-war_protests" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Marina_Ovsyannikova#Anti-war_p...</a> .<p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Marina_Ovsyannikova#Aftermath" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Marina_Ovsyannikova#Aftermath</a>

Twitter is an incredibly malleable medium - all sorts of people will &#x27;jump to the head of any parade&#x27; for self attention, new followers etc etc and various spooky and state actors are extremely busy promoting, trolling or undermining tweets. It&#x27;s a fascinating place and it&#x27;s often not hard to figure out who are trolls, bots and fake accounts, but sometimes you really have to think and look at surrounding activities.

Note: the blog post was published today at 13:00 UTC, and at that time, noted that the account seemed to have been suspended. However, as of 15:30 UTC, someone else has taken over the &quot;@MarinaOvsyy&quot; handle and is even impersonating the previous impersonator&#x27;s tweets.<p>The blog post&#x27;s screencap of @MarinaOvsyy: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pbs.twimg.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;FN5qPFRXwBMG7sw?format=jpg&amp;name=large" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pbs.twimg.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;FN5qPFRXwBMG7sw?format=jpg&amp;name=...</a><p>A current screencap of @MarinaOvsyy; besides the obviously different account (different join date, follower count, etc). note the difference in the 2nd most recent tweet, which is an attempt to copy the 2nd latest tweet in the previous faker: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pbs.twimg.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;FN5p1kwWYAM4Y2D?format=jpg&amp;name=large" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pbs.twimg.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;FN5p1kwWYAM4Y2D?format=jpg&amp;name=...</a>

Social media and Twitter is general is filled with fake accounts and trends. It&#x27;s almost like bombarded with fake accounts these days. This is the case at least here in India.

So the account is fake but the person and the incident are real? Is that the claim here or is everything fake? What is the author asking not to take at face value?<p>I read the article and I’m still confused.

&gt; <i>Twitter, of course, is blocked in Russia – and although she could be using a VPN, there would be no point in her doing that if she was tweeting under her own name.</i><p>I&#x27;m not sure I follow, if Twitter is blocked it doesn&#x27;t matter what name you use.

This is the result of lazy, emotional, reactionary, populist journalism that doesn&#x27;t do the work required to unearth new information, which is what real journalism is all about. Finding new relevant data is hard. Throwing up online is easy.

Can someone explain what&#x27;s going on here?

And hopefully this isn&#x27;t a diversion to try discredit everything she really did do...

I am surprised that the only punishment that Marina Ovsyannikova gets is less than $300 penalty. And then she was released.<p>It seems increasingly plausible that this event was staged by those in power who want to stop the war.

Anybody has news confirming she&#x27;s still alive ?

Sounds like Twitter can be as dangerous as real war.

It&#x27;s really too bad that authenticating user profiles is <i>impossible</i>. Therefore the socials (Facebook, Twitter, TikTok) have <i>no agency</i> and consequently are <i>forced</i> to serve as <i>unwitting</i> [1] accelerants for propaganda and disinformation.<p>Because reasons.<p>[1] Or perhaps just witless?<p>--<p>More seriously, I wonder if the Freedom Speeches™ trolls also support internet voting. Darn it. I&#x27;ve been remiss in not branding (faith-based) electronic voting. Which I now christen Freedom Votes™.<p>I regret the oversight.

Account maybe fake but the contents aligns with what she is doing, at it from a misinformation perspective, not a big red flag

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Here is a take on the incident itself which I think is worth a look: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;grishchukroma&#x2F;status&#x2F;1503500141159985157" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;grishchukroma&#x2F;status&#x2F;1503500141159985157</a><p>In short: This woman is an editor for the Russian propaganda machine, and it&#x27;s very likely this was staged&#x2F;is itself more propaganda aimed at the west.

Isn’t fake news detection a solved problem with NLP? Language and grammar detection was already making good progress almost a decade ago. If it works in the field of terrorism and social engineering, that it is not yet wielded for fake news seems to be reluctance on the part of social media entities. Having said that.. I am not a technical person..this is just a layman point of view.