How Elon Musk’s 16-million-view retweet of a WikiLeaks post may have been the culmination of an information laundering campaign: a thread. 
The morning of February 7, 2025 Elon Musk retweeted one of a pair of two Wikileaks posts made two hours prior which had reproduced in screenshot form the portion of a now-corrected Reporters Without Borders (RSF) article which included a false statistic.
In its February 3 article on the impact of the Trump administration’s halt on USAID grants to Ukraine’s media landscape, RSF—despite its otherwise high factual standards—misrepresented a cited source, inadvertently echoing a viral misinformation trope.
RSF’s article cited a piece by the NGO Institute of Mass Information (IMI), summarizing a Ukrainian-language interview with its director, Oksana Romaniuk, on Hromadske Radio, a Kyiv-based nonprofit talk station. The full interview is officially available only as Ukrainian audio.
Ms. Romaniuk’s interview detailed the severe impact of Russia’s full-scale invasion on Ukrainian media ad revenue and how grants, including from USAID and other international groups, helped compensate for these losses.
Romaniuk also emphasized the importance of independent media for the continued functioning of civil society in Ukraine and expressed concerns about how a withdrawal of USAID funding could undermine its future effectiveness.
The day the interview was released, politcal scientist Kost Bondarenko's Telegram channel—critical of Zelenskyy and allegedly pro-Kremlin—claimed Western funding of Ukrainian media was influencing content, asserting that these outlets had lost independence.
The next day, pro-Kremlin outlet Strana published an article quoting Bondarenko’s Telegram post. Crucially, this is where the report that 90% of Ukrainian media accept international grants was twisted into the baseless claim that they are 90% dependent on the U.S. government.
The day the Strana article was released, Ukrainian-Canadian political science professor Ivan Katchanovski, of the University of Ottawa, tweeted a link to it, prefacing it with a misquote of Romaniuk. This appears to be be where the trope made its Russian-to-English transition.
Katchanovski is best known for lending academic weight to Euromaidan conspiracy theories, often echoing pro-Kremlin narratives that question the uprising's legitimacy. His work is frequently reused by Russian state media, sparking debate in scholarly circles.
After Katchanovski's tweet the trope then quickly began widespread English-language dissemination. Russian state media and many Western pundits, including some with known affiliations with outlets like RT, either through interviews or past employment, were overrepresented.
Early examples, continued.
While the trope's early spread gravitated towards figures commonly viewed as being left-leaning, a notable exception to this was a conservative Republican, the well-known former U.S. Congressman Ron Paul.
In addition, countless anonymous X/Twitter accounts made mention of this false funding statistic. This is easily searchable.
RSF's otherwise thorough and well-researched article was likely influenced by a viral, incorrect statistic, with the writer making an inadvertent inclusion of it. We assess with moderate confidence that bad-faith actors pushed this false narrative.
*Correction: February 6
ADDENDUM: It is worth noting I tweeted at Mr. Katchanovski less than 24 hours after his, cautioning @aaronjmate of @TheGrayzoneNews, the first person I noticed sharing it, that this is how bad information spreads.
Unfortunately at that time I had low-to-no reach on X, and I don't know if Maté saw my remarks; he did not engage. Katchanovski promptly blocked me.
ERRATUM: Elon Musk's post came the morning of February 6th and not the 7th as previously stated.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
