Ukraine, plagiarism, and stolen valor
Spammy accounts impersonating Ukrainian military personnel are unfortunately a thing on multiple social media platforms
Meet @SerhiyShaptalau, an X account which purportedly belongs to Lieutenant General Serhiy Shaptala, who served as Chief of the General Staff of the Ukrainian military from July 2021 until February 2024. Unlike the official Ministry of Defence of Ukraine account (@DefenceU), this account lacks any sort of verification checkmark, and the follower count seems surprisingly low for a social media account belonging to a prominent official. Closer inspection quickly reveals more reasons to doubt the account’s self-proclaimed identity, including a penchant for plagiarism, at least one name change, and a history of posting from countries that are located on completely different continents than Ukraine.
The @SerhiyShaptalau account was created back in December 2022, and began posting shortly thereafter. The account’s earliest posts make no reference to Ukraine or the war, however; instead, they are largely informal and social in nature. Several of the account’s January 2023 posts are geotagged, and this is where things get more interesting, as the location tags indicate that these posts did not originate in Ukraine. Instead, the posts all appear to have been posted from Port Harcourt, Nigeria, a rather unlikely location for a senior Ukrainian military officer to be spending large amounts of time in during a war on Ukrainian soil.
Unsurprisingly, the @SerhiyShaptalau account wasn’t named @SerhiyShaptalau back when these posts were made. Search results indicate that the account, which has the permanent ID 1602000371471339523, was likely named @BelieveOgechi in January 2023. Analysis of the JSON object returned by the X API confirms this handle change.
What does the @SerhiyShaptalau account actually post? Most of the recent content is copied verbatim from the official @DefenceU X account. The duplicated posts usually contain both images and text. The remainder of the account’s recent posts are identical replies consisting of two emoji: a blue heart and a Ukrainian flag. In most cases, these replies are to posts that have nothing whatsoever to do with Ukraine, indicating a lack of awareness of context on the part of whoever (or whatever) is doing the replying.
Needless to say, X is not the only social media platform where this sort of activity occurs. Over on Bluesky, an account with the handle @olekzmyko.bsky.social and a photo of a Ukrainian sniper as an avatar has been attempting to build an audience among pro-Ukraine users via mass following and unfollowing. Like the @SerhiyShaptalau X account, this Bluesky account makes extensive use of plagiarized content, and has been renamed. (It is worth emphasizing that, despite the similarities in behavior, there is no overt evidence that this account and the @SerhiyShaptalau X account are run by the same entity.)
The @olekzmyko.bsky.social account’s current profile photo is an image of a sniper taken from the official Instagram page of the Ukrainian army. This image is vanishingly unlikely to depict the actual account operator, especially since the account used a photo of a different soldier as its avatar just three weeks ago. The account has also had its handle changed multiple times; it was initially created as @oleksander4193.bsky.social, briefly renamed to @olekz.bksy.social, and then finally (for now) renamed to the current @olekzmyko.bsky.social. These handle changes are public messages transmitted by Bluesky’s AT protocol, and handle change history for Bluesky accounts can be viewed using tools such as Clearsky.
Most of the @olekzmyko.bsky.social Bluesky account’s “original” posts are actually plagiarized from various X posts, most frequently those posted by @DefenceU. The duplicated posts contain both text and images from the originals, but quoted posts and links are dropped. The @olekzmyko.bsky.social account also occasionally reposts large numbers of @meanwhileua.bsky.social posts, frequently amplifying hundreds of posts per hour. Due to the high volume and repetitive nature of the repost activity, this aspect of the account’s behavior is likely to be automated (and it wouldn’t be difficult to automate the duplication of X posts as well).
Showing exactly why the work you do is so very important.. Great work!!!