The video went viral.
In a video that crashed onto social media and news sites worldwide last week, feminist activist and Russian law student Anna Dovgalyuk was shown pouring a bleach and water mixture on the crotches of unsuspecting men on the St. Petersburg Metro for their anti-feminist sin of “manspreading.”
“This solution is 30 times more concentrated than the mixture used by housewives when doing the laundry,” she claims in the video, according ot The Sun. “It eats colours in the fabric in a matter of minutes — leaving indelible stains.”
But the vigilante attacks on “manspreaders” — men who spread their legs wide in public places — was outed last week “as a staged piece of Russian government propaganda,” the New York Post reports.
The video was first posted to Kremlin-backed, English language site “In The Now” — owned by Russia Today (RT) — but as the clip spread, “online skeptics began to question its authenticity.”
One of the men featured in the video revealed in an interview with Russian-language online magazine Bumaga that he was an actor paid to appear in the clip.
Several other men in the clip have since come forward to say that they too were paid actors, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Fake news debunking site EU vs Disinformation suggested the video was intended to stir up anti-feminist sentiment.
One man, Stanislav Kudrin, said on a Russian social media site that the video was a production. “They poured water on us. Plus I slept in the hood too. Naturally, staged. That feeling when you come to the shooting with two spare pants and leave with a salary,” he wrote.
“TASS talked to the St Petersburg subway and the police where spokespersons said that no complaints or reports about such incidents had been registered, and that, in their view, the video was probably staged,” EU vs Disinformation reported.
The Norwegian daily Aftenposten has also covered the case. The newspaper notes about Anna Dovgalyuk that “her Instagram account is full of model images, spiced up with patriotic tributes of Russia, the army, the diplomatic corps and the Orthodox church”, and the original aim, before In The Now picked it up, was to “lure millions of young Russians to her YouTube channel”.
Aftenposten concludes that “the video was produced by the Russian production company My Duck’s Vision, which pumps out viral videos that combine conspiracies, anti-propaganda, humor and ridicule of Russian community critics”. My Duck’s Vision denied its involvement, in spite of a number of Russian commentators pointing at them as the producers, according to Bumaga.
