Russian disinfo is trying to spark a boycott of Stalker 2 by claiming it's going to draft you into the war in Ukraine somehow
Not for the first time, Stalker has found itself at the centre of a Russian propaganda campaign against Ukraine. As reported by 404 Media, journalists have recently been opening their inboxes to find a curious anomaly: a video purportedly from Wired that claims Stalker 2 is helping the Ukrainian government «locate citizens suitable for mobilization» using data-mining technology that's impossible to turn off.
«An embedded program was discovered in the game's code,» goes the video, «that collects player data and transmits it to the developer's servers.» It claims that, somehow, information about your IP address, name, device, and location are intended to help Ukraine's government find potential conscripts as part of a funding deal between Stalker dev GSC Game World and the Ukrainian state, and encourages viewers to boycott the game or play using a VPN.
None of which, of course, is true, and the video is not from Wired at all.
Instead, the video seems to come from the same murky source that was behind recent Matryoshka and Doppelganger campaigns: anti-Ukrainian trolls impersonating western news outlets to spread misinformation that negatively portrayed Ukraine and Ukrainians, played up western fatigue with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and wasted the time and energy of journalists and fact-checkers.
The campaigns work by spinning up an avalanche of nonsense—a fake story supposedly from Deutsche Welle about a Ukrainian artist trying to cut down the Eiffel Tower, one about a Ukrainian looter trying to rob the Paris catacombs, and myriad supposed pictures of anti-Ukraine graffiti in western cities—and forwarding them to journalists for 'verification.' At the same time, the fake videos are circulated across social media like Telegram, drowning media outlets which don't simply ignore the bogus stories in the work of debunking them while they spread like wildfire regardless.
It's no surprise that Stalker has drawn the eye of Russia's propaganda offensive. The series is one of
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