GTA 6 Russia ban story shows signs of Russian disinformation

An outrageous viral report raises questions about where information comes from — and how it spreads

Reports that GTA 6 could be banned in Russia emerged from a news story published on Jan. 14 on news.ru, a Russian news website. (We have omitted direct links to news.ru from this story, as the website was consistently blocked by one of our threat detection security apps.) The story claims that news.ru conducted an interview with Mikhail Ivanov, deputy chairman of the World Russian People’s Council and member of the Bryansk Regional Duma, in which the politician criticized Rockstar for including offensive material in its upcoming game.

“The creators of GTA VI are deliberately including destructive and vulgar content in their product, which is completely unacceptable to the moral health of society,” Ivanov is quoted as saying in the story, via machine translation. “This includes the planned inclusion of scenes of male striptease in the game, which is a direct and cynical violation of basic moral norms and traditional spiritual values. Allowing such content is tantamount to corrupting the younger generation. We need to either impose strict legal restrictions on the distribution of such games in Russia or require publishers to release special versions for our market, cleared of immoral content.”

Days after the story was published, multiple sites, including ComicBook, NME, TheGamer, GamingBible, and Dexerto, published reports about the ban, linking back to news.ru’s story as a sole source. (Yahoo also syndicated the story.) The claim continued to spread on social media platforms like X and Reddit, turning into a viral news story by Jan. 20.

Polygon has not yet been able to confirm the legitimacy of Ivanov’s GTA 6 quote. We’ve reached out to news.ru and to GTA 6 developer Rockstar Games but did not receive a response in time for publication.

The outspoken Ivanov has been at the center of a handful of strange stories in the past year that have spread through social media. Searching for Mikhail Ivanov on X, for instance, turns up multiple posts connecting the politician to several outrageous claims, from advocating for a Halloween ban to suggesting that Russia should implement an internet ban at night to bring up the country’s birthrate. These stories have occasionally been picked up and reported on by websites like The Mirror. That name search on X also turns up a flood of posts from Grok, explaining these stories to users who ask the platform’s AI tool for clarity.

Most recently, Ivanov appeared in the news again on Jan. 20, when he reportedly suggested that A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms and the next season of House of the Dragon should be banned in Russia, claiming that the shows promote false gods and spread ideology that's destructive to Christian values. That report also originated from news.ru, a source with minimal digital footprint beyond its website, social media accounts that were established in 2017, and a YouTube channel set up on May 11, 2021. Its biggest mention is on the Wikipedia page for NEWSru, an independent Russian news website that was shuttered in 2021. A redirect note at the top of the Wikipedia page says that the site is not to be confused with news.ru, though the former doesn’t link to a Wikipedia page of its own.

In researching the website, Polygon found that it was one of several websites with a news.ru domain mentioned in a 2022 report by Openfacto, a French non-profit group that works to promote open-source research. The report, published in January 2022, dug into websites tied to “Russian intelligence services’ involvement in online information operations.” News.ru, along with other websites that have a -news.ru URL structure, appears on an archived version of that list viewed by Polygon. Openfacto’s research claims these websites have links to InfoRos, a news agency that it says is run by the GRU, Russia’s intelligence agency.

“By registering no fewer than 1,341 digital news portals attached to cities, towns, districts, or even villages, InfoRos has created a network of amplifiers that surreptitiously broadcast the Russian government’s preferred narrative,” Openfacto wrote in 2022. “The websites are primarily empty shells that regularly copy and paste innocuous content. These sites publish InfoRos content at regular intervals, which has a pro-government or anti-Western tone.”

InfoRos has previously been linked to misinformation campaigns. In 2020, the news agency was accused by U.S. officials of spreading misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic through three of its websites.

Polygon reached out to Openfacto to confirm that the news.ru website that ran the GTA 6 story is in fact the same one that appears in its research. We will update this story when we receive a response.

InfoRos isn’t the only website network that’s been accused of spreading misinformation. A 2022 study from Viginum, a French government agency tasked with identifying “foreign networks that are covertly influencing the public debate,” linked multiple websites that utilize a -news.ru URL structure to a different information portal manipulation campaign dubbed Portal Kombat. News.ru itself is not part of that network, but the websites that were identified as part of the operation follow a similar playbook. In another part of its study, Viginum noted the similarities between tactics used by InfoRos and Portal Kombat, theorizing that the two operations could be linked by a shared service provider.

Why flood the internet with a bunch of news websites posting weird stories about Grand Theft Auto and Game of Thrones? It’s not about pop culture. While InfoRos and its sites have been around for a while, Vignium stresses that the sites it studied emerged after the beginning of Russia’s war with Ukraine, and serve as a way to control information about it. Vignium says that the purpose of the sites is to denigrate Ukraine and with content targeted toward “occupied Ukrainian territories, then several western countries supporting Ukraine and its population.”

“Although some information may seem innocuous, most of the content broadcast aims to primarily amplify the resentment of local Russian populations towards Ukrainian authorities and report on ongoing military operations, as evidenced by the ‘military correspondents’ section,” Vignium said in its study.

Those efforts have had some major ramifications on the internet at large. According to a 2025 report by the news and information rating system NewsGuard, which backs up another report by the American Sunlight Project, the websites within the Portal Kombat operation are manipulating information in AI models across the internet. NewsGuard says that the websites are able to flood search results and web crawlers, and that information in turn is scraped to provide data to large language models. As of March 2025, NewsGuard found that the sites were responsible for spreading 207 “provably false claims,” including ones that purported that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was misusing United States military aid for personal gain.

Regardless of its veracity, this week’s GTA 6 story shows exactly how this model of information manipulation can work. You can find several posts from the Grok account on X that confidently confirm Ivanov’s quote and include clickable links to news.ru’s homepage in the process, where you’ll be greeted with headlines like “‘Russia will not weaken’: Russian Armed Forces' repelling of drone attack delights Chinese residents.” Other Grok posts cite stories from the more legitimate publications that spread the story, pointing to websites like ComicBook instead, which in turn link back to news.ru.

It’s just one small example of a big problem with the internet’s current information pipeline. Websites can manipulate search engine optimization to spread stories. Those stories are scraped up by web crawlers and fed into AI tools that regurgitate them with no human vetting process. And on occasion, those stories even make their way to more legitimate-looking mainstream news outlets that republish the claims without additional reporting to confirm the news or the source itself. If that process can launch an odd but ultimately low-stakes Grand Theft Auto story to virality in mere days, what damage could a well-oiled operation do with something more serious and misleading?