LWYMMD: How Coordinated Narratives Engineer Outrage II

Written By Rachele Gilman & Zoé Fourel

Moscow Joins the Chat

When Culture Becomes an Influence Battlefield

What do Blake Lively, Amber Heard, Meghan Markle, and Taylor Swift have to do with the Kremlin?  Probably more than you think, but less than you might fear.

These are celebrity controversies, not geopolitical crises. Yet cultural conflicts increasingly attract the attention of foreign actors for a simple reason: they generate enormous attention, emotional engagement, and public participation at scale. In other words, the same dynamics that make these stories irresistible to fans also make them attractive terrain for influence operations. 

Celebrity controversies rarely produce a single audience. They produce factions. Fans defending their favourite figure, anti-fans sharpening the knives, and a large audience watching the spectacle while insisting they are only there for the entertainment. Once that ecosystem forms, the conversation is already loud, polarised, and emotionally charged. When Moscow joins the chat, it's not by accident. Cultural conflicts offer exactly the kind of environment that actors seek: high visibility with diverse audiences, low barriers to participation, and narratives that can be nudged to deepen division, reinforce grievances, or advance broader geopolitical messaging. A closer look at several recent controversies reveals that this pattern is not accidental.

Cultural spaces have long played a role in soft power competition. Music, film, sport, and celebrity culture have historically offered governments a means of projecting national identity and influencing international audiences. What has changed in recent years is the tactics used by foreign actors to participate directly in cultural controversies. Rather than introducing entirely new narratives, these actors often insert themselves into trending debates, amplifying divisions that already resonate with audiences.

The Kremlin has repeatedly demonstrated an interest in cultural flashpoints. Eurovision has long been framed in Russian state media as evidence of Western moral decline, often through narratives about the erosion of traditional values and the amplification of anti-LGBTQIA+ conspiracies like  “Gayropa” frequently used in Russian propaganda. Following Russia’s exclusion from the competition after the invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin revived efforts to promote an alternative cultural platform, Intervision, positioned as a defender of traditional culture against Western liberalism. Cultural conflict travels easily because it resembles entertainment rather than geopolitics.

Similar dynamics emerged during the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris. Debates surrounding the opening ceremony of the Olympics and Algerian boxer Imane Khelif became the focus of intense online narratives about gender, fairness in sport, and Western hypocrisy. Russian media and aligned ecosystems amplified these controversies as part of broader identity-based messaging designed to portray Western institutions as morally confused and politically unstable. 

These moments illustrate how cultural controversies become vehicles for narrative competition, where geopolitical messaging can be inserted into conversations that appear, at least on the surface, to be about entertainment or sport. Cultural controversies often reveal narrative dynamics before they appear elsewhere. Stories escalate and harden through a familiar set of ingredients: misogyny, identity-based disinformation, memes, moral framing, mass participation, and monetised amplification.

The Heard-Depp trial is where the picture gets interesting. Russian state outlets, including RT and Sputnik, published sustained coverage of the proceedings. In 2022, Sputnik Global published 93 articles mentioning Amber Heard, including 77 between 1 April and 20 June 2022, the period covering the Fairfax County trial. The coverage consistently portrayed Depp as the victim. In multiple instances, the primary source was Depp's lawyer, Adam Waldman. What makes that worth noting is that Waldman also worked for Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, subject to Western sanctions, and had previously engaged in lobbying activities linked to the Russian foreign ministry, including direct work with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. In the current geopolitical environment, those connections would normally attract significant scrutiny. In this case, the scrutiny landed almost entirely on Heard. None of this proves direct coordination between foreign actors and domestic discourse. But it illustrates something important: a celebrity trial can intersect with networks that influence operations researchers know well, and nobody in the entertainment press is looking for that. Properly investigating these patterns requires OSINT tools and technical infrastructure that are time-consuming to deploy and expensive to access, often beyond the reach of independent researchers working outside well-funded institutions. That is not an excuse for the gap. It explains why it persists and why the analysis that does exist tends to focus on overtly political targets rather than cultural ones. The consequences for public trust, for the women targeted, and for the integrity of the information environment are real, and they are going unexamined.

Russian state media consistently frames Heard as a villain,  portraying her as manipulative, a gold digger, or dishonest, echoing misogynistic tropes. The narrative alignment closely mirrored the widely circulating online framing targeting Blake Lively and Meghan Markle, who were regularly portrayed in Russian state media as hypocritical, manipulative and deceptive. The rhetoric around both women promotes the Kremlin’s recurring narrative of Western cultural decline, while the Heard narratives reinforce portrayals of  US/ Western men being persecuted by false assault allegations. Such coverage fits neatly within a broader messaging strategy that positions Western societies as morally decadent and politically unstable. This framing did not stay confined to state media. The portrayal of Western men as victims of manipulative women maps directly onto manosphere narratives already circulating at scale across mainstream and fringe platforms. Spaces built around male grievance, anti-feminist backlash, and hostility towards women who speak publicly about abuse were primed to receive exactly this kind of content. The Heard-Depp trial became one of the most visible moments in which those ecosystems and state-aligned amplification appeared to move in the same direction, towards the same target, at the same time. Whether that alignment was coordinated or simply opportunistic, the effect was the same. A domestic culture war provided ready-made infrastructure, and the Kremlin did not have to build anything. It just had to join the chat.

The Kremlin uses these cases to redirect Western audiences to more overt pro-Kremlin messaging, like the war in Ukraine. It is worth noting that Russian-language coverage does not serve a single audience. Narratives published in Russian function simultaneously as domestic propaganda, messaging for diaspora communities, and influence content aimed at Russian-speaking audiences abroad, including Russian-speaking Ukrainians. Cultural controversies, therefore, provide a flexible vehicle through which the same story can circulate across multiple information environments at once. For instance, the Russian-backed influence operation Portal Kombat titled an article "Meghan Markle violated the royal ban for the first time: Ukraine is to blame”. Another article claimed that Meghan Markle had sold a dress to Ukrainian first lady Olena Zelenska, strongly implying corruption to deter Western aid to Ukraine. Where that redirection leads is clearest in the most explicit examples. Russian-speaking outlet RIA stated in June 2022, a couple of months into the invasion of Ukraine, that Western support for Ukraine would decline, openly promoting pro-Kremlin rhetoric calling Ukrainians 'nazis' while portraying Western audiences as frivolous, with a limited attention span and uninterested in sustaining support for Ukraine. The celebrity coverage was never the destination. It was the on-ramp.

Unsurprisingly, Russian influence operation coverage of these celebrity cases leverages similar tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) as in more “traditional” information campaigns that cast a deceptive perception of election cycles or geopolitical crises. Russian state media amplifies controversial domestic voices; for instance, Sputnik shared Joe Rogan’s comments mocking Amber Heard and her legal team. Portal Kombat also leveraged these celebrity cases to promote domestic narratives, including more overt conspiracy theories, linking the Heard-Depp trial to global conspiracy theories, such as the use of adenochrome by global elites. For the uninitiated, adrenochrome is a real chemical compound with no proven psychedelic properties and absolutely no requirement for a child. You can buy it from a laboratory supplier for around fifty pounds. None of this has stopped it from becoming a cornerstone of QAnon mythology, which holds that a global cabal of liberal politicians and Hollywood celebrities kidnap and torture children to harvest adrenochrome from them as a psychedelic elixir of youth. The conspiracy has its roots in a line of dialogue from Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a novel that is emphatically not a documentary. It migrated through Pizzagate, absorbed the anti-Semitic blood libel trope that has circulated for centuries, and arrived fully formed in QAnon. By linking the Heard-Depp trial to adrenochrome, Russian state media was not introducing a fringe idea to a mainstream audience. It was attaching a pre-loaded conspiracy to a story that millions of people were already watching, and the audience did the rest. 

The same opportunism is visible in the Kremlin's engagement with transvestigation, a domestic influence tactic that deserves a brief explanation because it is as bizarre as it sounds. Transvestigation, as defined by GLAAD, involves targeting cisgender public figures with fabricated pseudo-scientific claims that they are secretly transgender, with the clear implication that being transgender is something shameful to expose. The targets are overwhelmingly cisgender women: Michelle Obama, Brigitte Macron, Imane Khelif, and, more recently, Erika Kirk, CEO of Turning Point USA. The tactic did not originate with the Kremlin. It grew domestically, in the same online spaces where anti-LGBTQIA+ hostility and conspiracy thinking overlap. What the Kremlin did was notice it was working and join in. Portal Kombat published multiple articles transvestigating Taylor Swift, using images of Swift from the Eras Tour to claim she was concealing masculine physical traits. The content was not sophisticated. It did not need to be. It was already travelling.

For influence actors, the appeal of cultural controversy is straightforward. The audience has already assembled itself. The narratives are already emotional. The divisions are already visible. Amplification is easier than invention, and the infrastructure is free.

What makes Moscow's presence in these spaces genuinely unsettling is that we rarely know when they entered, or whether the account screaming about Taylor Swift's jawline at two in the morning is a devoted fan, a domestic ideologue, or a bot running a wedge narrative on someone else's payroll. The sophistication is not in the content. It is in the patience, the timing, and the ability to read a cultural moment and insert just enough pressure at exactly the right point. The fire was already burning. But Moscow joins the chat and fans the flames.


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Rachele Gilman & Zoé Fourel
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Look What You Made Me Do: How Coordinated Narratives Engineer Outrage