‘Everyone just looks the other way’ How Moscow hijacked tens of thousands of local government social media pages to fill users’ feeds with ‘garbage news’
Russian state agencies have long used social media to push pro-Kremlin messages, but over the past three years, this practice has escalated to a new level. Nearly 200,000 accounts — not just for government offices but also for schools, community centers, hospitals, and museums — now frequently post “patriotic” and pro-war content. Journalists from the independent outlet Novaya Vkladka spoke with employees at some of these institutions to find out where these posts originate — and whether ordinary staff can do anything to stop them. Meduza shares an abridged translation of their report.
In late 2020, Natalia, then a university student in Russia’s Petrozavodsk, took a part-time job at a municipal office in the city. Her employer told her she would be working on social development projects, but didn’t provide any details. For the first two months, she sat at a computer with nothing to do. Only later did she learn that she was essentially filling in for employees on maternity leave.
The institution was supposedly part of the social welfare sector, but even after three years, Natalia never fully understood what it actually did. Despite its departments being named after specific groups like pensioners and children, it didn’t seem to work with them at all. Speaking to Novaya Vkladka, Natalia struggled even to describe her own job.
In the summer of 2022, she was promoted to public relations specialist after the previous employee quit. The office had professional filming equipment, a camera, and even a green screen, yet its official social media page had only about 2,000 followers. According to Natalia, she had no experience with social media management and got the job simply because she was the youngest.
For the first few months, she still had little idea what she was supposed to be doing. Gradually, she started receiving assignments: writing news articles, designing training programs for social workers, or writing reports from various events. But as she put it, none of it served any real purpose — for either the city’s residents or the institution itself.
The sheer pointlessness of the job sent her into a depression. Eventually, she couldn’t take it anymore and quit. But after a few months, out of money and struggling with her mental health, she saw no choice but to return. That’s when she discovered that the once-irrelevant social media page had started receiving “news from above.”
As far as I know, the content was generated by the Regional Management Center (RMC) and was manually distributed to all subordinate institutions. My director would send me posts to publish, which she received via email from the RMC. They were all generic. If you scroll through any government-affiliated page, you’ll see the same kind of content — random videos about the war, “our boys,” and so on. Internally, we just called it “garbage news.”
‘What counts as patriotic?’
Since December 2022, all Russian government agencies, municipal offices, and subordinate organizations have been required to maintain official social media pages. A set of federal amendments passed that year designated the sites VKontakte and Odnoklassniki as the main platforms for this policy. The pages had to be registered through Gosuslugi, Russia’s official government services portal, after which they were marked with a Russian flag icon and labeled as “government organizations.”
Officials present these government-run pages as a “convenient communication system between authorities and citizens.” Andrey Tsepelev, the deputy director of the organization Dialog Regions, which oversees the entire network, gave the following assessment at a December 2024 holiday event dedicated to the tens of thousands of accounts:
No other country in the world has such a transparent system, where every agency has its own social media page. […] The law has been deemed successful and requires no changes. These pages form the world’s largest editorial network. Right now, we have 175,000 pages, and according to the latest data, just over 70 percent of them are systematically maintained, meaning they post at least three times a week.
Citing data from the government-run Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VTsIOM), Tsepelev claimed that one in three Russians reads these pages regularly. He also described them as a “weapon in the information hybrid war being waged against our country.”
“There’s no room to retreat. The harmful ideas our enemies try to plant in us and the younger generation will be difficult to root out. Every state social media page is a defensive position,” he added.
From the start, responsibility for producing “military-patriotic” content for these pages fell to the RMCs, established in every Russian region in 2020 by a decree from Putin.
Natalia remembers the immediate impact of the 2022 amendments. Shortly after they passed, she told Novaya Vkladka, a press secretary from the regional Social Protection Ministry was added as an administrator on her institution’s social media page.
“At first, I think the posts were still sent manually for publication, but at some point, they started going up automatically [through Gosuslugi]. And then, my social media accounts were suddenly flooded with all this garbage news, completely clogging up our followers’ feeds,” Natalia said.
The same thing happened at a state-run theater in the Kirov region. Evgenia, who has worked in public relations there for several years, said that before 2022, no one interfered with how they managed their social media. But after the amendments, stricter controls were introduced — like other organizations, they began receiving “news from above.” Unlike the theater’s own posts, Evgenia said, the “patriotic” content is mostly ignored and gets the fewest likes.
Inna, who’s managed multiple social media pages for a youth community center in the Novosibirsk region for over a decade, recalled receiving an email in 2022 instructing them to register their page on Gosuslugi. All administrators had to link their personal accounts to the government portal; those who failed to do so within a week were removed.
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Inna never considered delaying registration — she needed access to continue posting updates on events and projects. “We all have an insane workload, so you just complete the tasks and move on. Those who didn’t see it as important just ignored registration anyway,” she explained.
The youth center had already begun posting “military-patriotic” content months before registration on Gosuslugi became mandatory. “There was this element of pressure — posts were sent down to us, and we were required to publish them,” Inna said. “Our director didn’t change anything; she posted them exactly as they were sent. But she’s quite patriotic. I barely remember what those posts were about because I was struggling to deal with it all and tried to stay out of it. All I wanted was to delete, delete, delete them.”
The posts came from the mayor’s office and the district administration, along with instructions on “working with youth in times of socio-political tension.” The center was also given a mandatory list of war documentaries to show children and young people — films that, according to Inna, were “as graphic as possible.” She and her colleagues pretended to have watched them and even faked a photo report, but in reality, they never screened the films for visitors.
The youth center submits weekly reports to the mayor of Novosibirsk on its “patriotic” social media activity.
“If you’re not in the mayor’s weekly report, it’s like you didn’t do any work at all. What counts as patriotic? War documentaries, meetings with ‘special military operation’ heroes, posts glorifying the history of the ‘special military operation’ and World War II, commemorations, lectures, discussions — anything related to military activity. Even though environmental issues are officially considered a form of patriotism in educational programs, the leadership doesn’t count that,” Inna explained.
Evgenia from the Kirov region said that the social media page of the theater where she works was also integrated into the state-run system in 2022, but she and her colleagues try to “navigate carefully.”
“The leadership’s stance plays a crucial role. We work with a lot of cultural institutions, and I follow dozens of theaters across the country, so I see the difference. Some places are raising money for drones, while for us, that kind of content is minimal — we only post the automated updates,” she said.
One such post, Evgenia recalled, was published in the fall of 2024 as part of a nationwide campaign supporting the families of soldiers fighting in Ukraine. According to Evgenia, she and her colleagues try to bury these posts in the feed by quickly posting more of their own content afterward.
Lyudmila, who works at a kindergarten in Vologda, said her school received a call from the local education department asking them to add an unfamiliar account as an administrator to their VKontakte page. The same account was also added as an admin for other educational institutions in the region. Its profile picture was a generic stock photo. According to Lyudmila, this account now posts “pro-government content” in school and kindergarten groups.
‘Refusing won’t make you any less complicit’
According to Inna from Novosibirsk, it’s sometimes “sickening to even open” her workplace’s social media page because of the overwhelming amount of military content. She recalled that in 2022, when the youth center was asked to post recruitment ads for contract service, some followers — especially parents — left critical comments. After that, the number of these posts decreased. Inna remembers deleting one particularly long anti-war comment “just to be safe” — she didn’t want the author to get fined.
Among her coworkers, she said, opinions on the war vary: some quietly oppose it, while others are openly patriotic because their “husbands and relatives are in the combat zone.” These women spend their evenings at the center weaving camouflage nets. But no one discusses the war openly, she said.
Evgenia from the Kirov region also said the war isn’t talked about at work. “Everyone understands everything,” she told Novaya Vkladka. She compared it to the buses marked with the pro-war Z symbol: “When they first appeared, a lot of people refused to ride them. But then you realize that refusing won’t make you any less complicit in the system, and you still need to get to work. It’s the same with these government-run social media pages — everyone just looks the other way.”
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Her boss, she added, has been accommodating and reassigned the task of managing the pages to other employees. “He knows exactly where I stand, so they don’t bother me about it and try not to provoke me.” According to Evgenia, no one on her team supports the war, and they follow the new rules “just to keep the theater running.”
Inna still works at the youth center, but she admitted she struggles with internal conflict. “I deal with it by reminding myself that I’m staying true to my position and that, even if I don’t speak out publicly, I can still influence things in my own way. I try to minimize discussions about this topic with young people.”
For Natalia from Petrozavodsk, her anti-war stance led to tensions within her family. At work, she felt increasingly ashamed of the state-mandated posts she was required to publish, knowing she was the one pressing the “post” button. She described the endless stream of official content as a “flood of garbage news” and said she believes that, over time, this kind of propaganda shapes how followers perceive events.
In early 2024, Natalia left her job. “It wasn’t some dramatic moment where I was forced to carry the Russian flag somewhere. I just got sick of it,” she said. She was the only one from her team who quit.