On 27 August 2023, fact-checkers at the Ukrainian Po Toy Bik Novyn (“On the Other Side of News”) project reported that a fake article allegedly published by journalist Iryna Synelnyk was being promoted on Facebook as a legitimate publication. Synelnyk, a journalist based in the northern Ukrainian city of Chernihiv who works with the Ukrainian news agency UNIAN, denied that she had published the article. The journalist also confirmed the incident to the Institute of Mass Information (IMI), a Ukrainian press freedom monitoring group. “Recently, fake websites of Ukrainian publications have appeared, with articles reproducing Russian narratives published under the names of journalists of these publications”, Synelnyk told IMI.”
Journalists, of course, do not know that their name has been used. Such a story happened to me. On Facebook, these materials are distributed as advertisements. If the link of UNIAN publications ends with ‘html’, then the fake link ends with ‘php’. This is the difference, [otherwise] the page is visually identical to the original.” According to Po Toy Bik Novyn, the fake news articles are similar in their pro-Russian narrative. They allege that “the Ukrainian government is mired in corruption, Western aid is ‘going down the drain’, the military cannot resist the ‘flood’ of Russian missiles and therefore it is necessary to negotiate urgently, the newly mobilized are sent to slaughter without preparation”, the fact-checking project wrote in a Facebook post.