The disinformation campaigns do not stop from Moscow. athletes like Messi or actresses of the stature of Angelina Jolie or Jennifer Aniston They are victims of the Kremlin. They use their faces to spread false claims against Ukraine. A group of Russian opposition journalists has compiled more than 120,000 false publications launched on the Internet by Putin’s people.

The point is such that they have used a manipulated fragment of Messi in which he says the following: “Ukraine no longer exists. All our money went down the drain”. The Kremlin and its tentacles on the networks have invented it to score a goal for Kyiv and, incidentally, for the millions of users who may have stung when reading it.

They use well-known soccer players and also actresses: “We are impoverished, it is time to forget about Ukraine,” words they attribute to the American Jennifer Aniston. She would assure that there is poverty because of the funds sent to support the Ukrainian army.

The Finnish software and methodologies company Check First published a report in which it exposed the Kremlin’s practices regarding the bombing and ‘fake news’ to society. ‘Operation Overload’, the name given to the studio, encompasses a multitude of actors who carried out these campaigns to deceive Russians using the image of celebrities.

According to Check First’s findings, ‘Operation Overload’ is a precisely timed tactic during a crucial global election season that stands out for its coordination, repetition and scaleas well as for its sophistication.

Since at least August 2023, it consists of the publication of manipulated content on Russian-language Telegram channels and then on websites related to the Kremlin, some publications that are subsequently spread on the social networkwhere disinformers question verifiers, among other media and institutions.

The last phase of this multi-layered manipulation campaign involves the coordinated sending of emails to the verifiers, to whom they send the content previously published on Telegram, X or websites that remain under their control. In total, X’s accounts More than 800 institutions and organizations from 75 countries were targeted by the networkincluding 200 verifiers.