In mid-December 2024, screenshots of a viral post on X with comments circulated on social networks, proving that US residents had great respect for the Russian president. We have verified the authenticity of these screenshots.
On December 19, the annual live line with Vladimir Putin took place in Russia, during which the Russian president answered questions from Russian citizens and foreign journalists. On the same day, a screenshot of an earlier tweet from a certain Wendy Parker (@whendycomes) appeared in the Russian-language segment of social networks, who supposedly on behalf of “many people” wanted to ask Putin to “stop LGBTQ+ freaks.” The tweet allegedly received 470,000 views, and some comments from ordinary Americans under it (“No questions. It would just be cool if he became our president,” “Vladimir Putin, please bring order to our country,” etc.) received a large number of likes.
The main platform for distributing these screenshots with the corresponding commentary was Telegram, where they were published by the channels “Ne.Sugar"(224,000 views at the time of writing this analysis), "Solovyov" (188,000), "Uncle Slava"(183,000), "Russia now"(157,000), Voblya (118,000), etc.
Annual press conference of Vladimir Putin took place December 19, 2024 and for the third time was combined with a straight line. For four and a half hours, the politician answered questions from both ordinary citizens and journalists, including foreign ones. Most of the questions concerned social problems of Russians, but international topics were also touched upon, such as the war in Ukraine and events in Syria. You could ask your question five in different ways: through the website, SMS, MMS, mobile application and social networks.
Wendy Parker's tweet was allegedly posted on December 17, two days before the press conference. Judging by the blue checkmark, Parker's account verified, that is, its owner at the time of receiving the status confirmed her identity and was actively blogging.
However, “Verified” not only did not find any information about a woman named Wendy Parker with the face shown in the profile photo, but also discovered that the account was @whendycomes at the time of writing the analysis doesn't exist. There is also no indication that it existed previously and, for example, was blocked. There are no mentions of a user with this nickname in posts of other users.
What about the commentators on the sensational post? Social network X is also unknown to users Mike Brendy (@mbrendy2), Oliviaa7 (@ollyt9), Chloe (@chloeve61), and the user @jamescarty uses just the name James (without the surname Cart and photo), does not follow anyone and has only one subscriber. Thus, none of the four commentators whose names can be seen in the viral screenshots exist in reality. And this despite the fact that here, too, three of them were presented as verified.
According to the TGStat service, the earliest publication of screenshots of comments to Wendy Parker’s tweet took place on December 19 at 14:58 Moscow time, when they were posted by the Telegram channel “Bear" At 15:11 in the channel "Odessa for victory“separately posted a screenshot of Wendy Parker’s tweet itself, and later the photographs were actively distributed together. Both channels previously featured in “Verified” analyzes as primary sources of misinformation.
Cover photo: social networks
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