Russia’s Latest Target: NewsGuard
Commentary by NewsGuard’s Eva Maitland and McKenzie Sadeghi
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Commentary: Russia’s Latest Target: NewsGuard
By Eva Maitland and McKenzie Sadeghi
If you’ve got Russian bots in your social media feed, you’d have been told that NewsGuard is firing its staff, takes secret bribes from Moldovan officials, and uncovered election fraud in Moldova. Of course, none of that is true, but that isn’t stopping a Kremlin-backed operation from using NewsGuard’s name, logo, and branding to advance these and other false claims against us.
And while it was a surprise to see ourselves targeted by the “dezinformatsiya” superpower that reportedly spends billions of dollars a year on foreign disinformation, it was not a shock. Indeed, the Russian campaign impersonating us has all the hallmarks of Kremlin retaliation for us calling out its previous abuses including masquerading as other news outlets, companies and even Western government agencies.
Two weeks ago, NewsGuard published a report documenting how the Russian malign influence campaign known as Matryoshka (a reference to Russian stacking dolls) is targeting the pro-West government of the Eastern European nation of Moldova with false claims ahead of its upcoming elections. That apparently put a target on our backs, and now NewsGuard joins 75 other government and media organizations our analysts have reported that have been impersonated online and globally by Matryoshka. Other victims include the FBI, French governmental agency Viginum, advocacy group Reporters Without Borders, Microsoft, and dozens of top news brands including the BBC and CNN.
The fabricated videos, generated by AI and, as shown above, styled to look like authentic NewsGuard reports, spread false claims, including that:
NewsGuard reported that Moldovan families in urgent need of government assistance are forced to vote for the pro-European Party of Action and Solidarity [PAS] in exchange for help in obtaining medical cards.
NewsGuard fired the analysts who wrote the report about Matryoshka targeting Moldova because Moldova had “commissioned” the stories.
NewsGuard reported that it uncovered an international network that uses comatose patients to interfere with elections in Moldova.
NewsGuard reported that more than 129 cases of election result manipulation have been recorded in Moldova.
NewsGuard editors were paid $150,000 to publish the report about Moldova.
Watch one of the videos here:
What the Platforms Did (or Didn’t) Do
With assistance from antibot4navalny, an anonymously run volunteer group that tracks Russian influence operations that was mentioned in one of the fake NewsGuard videos (claiming that Moldova will use the votes of people with “mental disorders” to manipulate the election), we identified 41 posts on X and 10 posts on Bluesky containing the fake videos impersonating NewsGuard. As of this writing, all X posts remained live on the platform. Three of the Bluesky posts remained live, while seven were removed.
The day the fake videos appeared, on Aug. 1, 2025, we did what the platforms say entities should do if they’ve been impersonated. We filed content violation reports to X and Bluesky. Both claim to ban inauthentic content. X, for example, states in its Community Guidelines that “You may not impersonate individuals, groups, or organizations to mislead, confuse, or deceive others.” Bluesky similarly states in its Community Guidelines that users cannot engage in the “misleading impersonation of other individuals, organizations, or entities.”
Nevertheless, by Aug. 5, 2025, we had not heard back from either platform regarding the status of our complaints. We do not know if Bluesky removed some of the videos because of our complaint or for other reasons.
As a journalistic entity ourselves, we took the opportunity to follow up with emails to the press teams at X and Bluesky. This time, in addition to seeking information on the status of our complaints, we specifically requested information from each platform about how many moderators are currently dedicated to reviewing violation reports, how long such reviews typically take, and how many reports the platforms receive daily on average. Neither X nor Bluesky has responded to any of these basic questions aimed at pinpointing how effectively they enforce their standards.
The silence is telling: Even when evidence of hostile foreign manipulation is clear and well-documented, tech platforms are slow to respond, if they respond at all. As a result, the burden of identifying and escalating these campaigns continues to fall on journalists, researchers, and the public, while the systems that were supposedly designed to prevent this kind of manipulation remain unaccountable and apparently under-resourced.
A Familiar Pattern
Matryoshka’s impersonation of NewsGuard is part of a broader pattern of targeting Russia’s critics. Time and again, the campaign has imitated the very organizations that have been monitoring it, attempting to co-opt those group’s reputations to spread falsehoods and discredit their work.
The videos imitating NewsGuard did not appear to generate significant traction. But as past Matryoshka campaigns have shown, it doesn’t take much for one video to break through when it is shared by the right person. In February 2025, a video purporting to be a report from E! News that was linked to Matryoshka falsely claimed that USAID paid millions to send Hollywood celebrities to Kyiv. This hoax racked up 31 million views after it was shared by X owner Elon Musk and Donald Trump Jr., both of whom had a stake in discrediting USAID.
It’s a clear demonstration of what experts have long warned: If 99 fake videos are ignored but one lands in the right feed, that’s enough to justify the entire campaign and bankroll its continuation.
As for NewsGuard, we resent being impersonated and the libel that our editors were paid $150,000 to publish the Moldova report. We’ll take baseless accusations of bribes as confirmation we’re doing something right.
Eva Maitland is a Senior Analyst at NewsGuard. McKenzie Sadeghi is the AI and Foreign Influence Editor at NewsGuard.
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Newsguard should feel honored to have consumed the resources of the bad guys in this way. It's a very useful cautionary tale, no doubt one we will need to remember frequently.