Viewership of Lukashenko's Interview Nearly 1 million Bots, & Senior Native Citizen of Gomel Turned Out to be AI-Generated Face. Fake News Exposed by Media IQ

The Belarussian independent media outlet ‘Flagshtok’ discovered that the portrait of an elderly woman, published in the pro-government newspaper ‘Gomelskie Vedomosti’ on August 23, was generated by artificial intelligence. The “native senior citizen of Gomel” has highly praised the city in the article.

The similarity of the “photo” to AI-generated images, such as Midjourney, seemed suspicious to journalists. So, the portrait looks heavily retouched and unnatural, the collar of the woman’s blouse is asymmetrical, and there are features of an American or European city on the blurred background.

A check by aiornot.com confirmed that the illustration was artificial.

Here are some more of the pieces of evidence of fake news uncovered by the media outlet ‘Flagshtok’:

“The author of the article is Svetlana Tyagunova. The newspaper uses the same name for its tendentious articles about the decline of Western countries, reviews of cultural events, and events in the city of Gomel. The author's name is probably also fictitious.

Svetlana Tyagunova has not been mentioned on the pages of the newspaper until March 2023, and a real photograph of such a reporter could not be found.”

All this suggests that the article's hero does not exist at all.

In response to the fake news expose, state media used bots to prove that the AI-generated face belonged to a real person, instead of admitting falsification. On Flagshtok’s social networks under posts related to this topic, there were comments saying that the senior is real, she just looks very good.

According to the verification made by journalists, some of these comments belong to employees of Lukashenko’s regime system, and others belong to bots, that is, fake accounts.

For example, here is one of the comments from a fake account:

“Granny-cute. Nice to see, I think she would be nice looking just without a filter as well. Why criticize the article? Nowadays young people don't post unedited photos and that’s ok, but there is a tragedy.”

And here is what Ekaterina Kravchenko, senior inspector of the Department of Ideological Work, Culture and Youth Affairs of the Loyev District Executive Committee, wrote without hiding her identity:

“As for me, it’s a photo of a real person, just a professional photo and respect to the photographer. They just blurred the background a little and brightened the colors.”

Belarusian state media promotes a recent interview with Aleksandr Lukashenko. On August 17, he spoke with Diana Panchenko, a Russian propagandist with Ukrainian citizenship who calls herself a Ukrainian journalist. By the way, a criminal case was opened against her in Ukraine.

Using state media, propaganda of the Lukashenko regime points to high audience interest in his interview on YouTube. There are allegedly millions of views and tens of thousands of comments.

Media IQ has analyzed the statistics and comments. Indeed, there were more than 12 million views on different channels in total within a week. Considering the uniformity of posts from suspicious accounts with nicknames by type “user-*random character set*”, the high popularity of Lukashenko's interview was ensured by targeted work with social media bots and fake accounts.