Alert: Coordinated Campaign on X Baselessly Claims Belarusian Man Who Attacked 18-Month-Old in Russia is Jewish
There is no evidence to suggest that Vladimir Vitkov, the Belarusian man who brutally attacked a young child and left him in a coma, is Jewish.
Update: See end of article for final 24-hour virality assessment
A shocking incident occurred earlier today at Moscow's Sheremetyevo International Airport when Vladimir Vitkov, a Belarusian tourist, brutally attacked an 18-month-old Iranian child. The child, who had just arrived in Russia with his mother after fleeing Iran due to Israel’s war to destroy the country’s nuclear facilities, was slammed headfirst onto the floor by Vitkov, who was reportedly under the influence of drugs.
The attack, which took place in the arrivals hall, left the child in a coma with severe skull and spinal injuries. Vitkov, who confessed to attempting murder, was detained at the scene, and investigations are ongoing.
At around 07:30 AM Eastern Time, Google Trends shows that Vitkov’s name began to gain public attention. Just an hour later, several notorious antisemitic accounts on X (formerly Twitter) began posting unfounded claims that Vitkov was Jewish and a Zionist. To the contrary, an image purporting to show Vladimir has since emerged that shows him wearing a cross around his neck.
A social media analysis by Jewish Onliner reveals that in the last five hours alone, these baseless claims have been spread in 55.7k posts, receiving 262k engagements and reaching a potential viewership of 166 million.
Some of the users generating the most traction for this false narrative, including accounts like Megatron and Adame Media, were recently found by the Network Contagion Research Institute to be part of a Russian and Iranian-tied disinformation campaign aimed at radicalizing and fracturing the American right.
It's crucial to note that our analysis is not yet complete. For instance, this post by Sulaiman Ahmed — with 14M views and 176K likes after only seven hours — doesn’t include any of the keywords we flagged, yet has gone extremely viral. In other words, this antisemitic narrative likely has millions more views than initially identified.
This kind of behavior is unfortunately typical of antisemites, who often spread false and damaging rumors, blaming Jews for any major incident without any evidence. Such lies frequently go viral on platforms like X.
Update: 24 hours after the disinformation campaign began, Jewish Onliner conducted a more thorough analysis to assess how widely it spread in just one day. These are the results:
And we're supposed to believe that yours is an objective non biased opinion…??
There will be a lot more like this.