The communities of the VKontakte administration massively distributed fake news about the death of Navalny

On Friday, December 22, a number of official communities of the administration of the social network VKontakte published news about the death of the opposition politician Alexei Navalny. At the same time, all the reposts were with reference to the fake public of the online publication "Medusa". The opposition himself, having learned about his mass "network funerals", said that he is alive, sits at home and eats dumplings.

The news of Navalny’s death appeared at about 22:00 Moscow time, TJournal reports. The message was published in VK Music, VK Messenger, VK Mobile, VK Live, a closed public for testing participants and other official communities conducted by the VK administration.

All reposts conducted an entry in a community called Meduza, allegedly representing the Internet publication of the same name on the social network, but in fact turned out to be Fakeov. It consisted of about 600 people, while more than 400 thousand people were signed for the official public Medusa, moreover, it was marked with a blue checkpoint.

The false record said: "Alexey Navalny was killed today at 21:33 in the entrance of his house." About 10 minutes after the appearance of the reposts, the fake community was blocked. Reposts with a message about the death of Navalny were removed. But hundreds of users of social networks managed to repost them.

Navalny himself, in response to a notification of one of the Twitter users that the opposition “VKontakte” is killed massively with reference to the fake @Meduzaproject, ” wrote :“ Not, like alive. I sit at home and eat dumplings for dinner ”.

In another message, Navalny confirmed that "some Dumers in" VK "are massively postponing the fake news" Medusa "that I was killed." “No, everything is OK, they didn’t kill,” the opposition assured, putting pictures of the screen with fake news reposts to the message.

Oh, true. Some Dumers in VK massively post a fake news to Medusa that they had killed me. No, everything is ok, they didn’t kill. pic.twitter.com/fkdcvrjag2

- Alexey Navalny (@navalny) December 22, 2017

Moreover, a warning about the spreading fake appeared in the Medusa community and the call is not “maintained on provocations”. "Friends, all the screenshots of the bad news of the alleged medium about Alexei Navalny are fake. We did not write anything like this and do not post. Do not go to provocations," the official public of the Internet publication says.