Texty.org.ua journalist faces veiled threats after reporting on immigration panic

Texty.org.ua journalist Valeria Pavlenko faced veiled threats and hateful comments on social media following her reporting on the recent immigration panic, Pavlenko reported in a comment to the Institute of Mass Information journalist Valentyna Troyan and in a Facebook post.

Pavlenko said that the aggressive response was triggered by her analytical article “The Immigrants Invading Ukrainian TikTok”, which discussed artificially orchestrated media campaigns.

“There comes a day in the life of every journalist when they get threatened for their reporting. For me, this day came yesterday. And do you know why? Because we at Texty.org.ua released a study saying that the surge of hate towards immigrants bears all the hallmarks of a propaganda campaign,” Valeria Pavlenko said in her post.

She added that she initially expected such a reaction to come from her high-profile investigations or articles criticising officials, and not her analytical work.

The response was sparked by a comment to her video from a user named @michael01307, which read: “Madam host, will you feel safe walking outside after such videos? Aren’t you afraid that your work for the PO [President’s Office] will come back to bite you someday? Or simply, have you no shame?” The journalist replied, asking if the user was not afraid of being sued for threats; the user later deleted all their comments and the account.

In a comment to IMI, Valeria Pavlenko explained that she decided to make this situation public immediately to raise awareness of inappropriate comments and aggression online. She has not yet contacted her editorial office or the police for help.

She said that after she discussed the incident publicly, some anonymous users started arguing that the aggression had been justified.

“I didn’t receive any threats after that, but when I posted a thread about it, several anonymous accounts replied that ‘they were right, propagandists should hang’ or something like that (I didn’t read the comments, I blocked them immediately), and some argued that these were not threats. I don’t understand in what way the sentence ‘aren’t you scared to go out after such videos, aren’t you afraid that it will come back to bite you’ doesn’t sound like a veiled threat to someone,” Pavlenko stressed, adding that after the first comment was deleted, no one wrote to her personally.

As IMI reported, the court of appeal held no hearings on threats to the journalist Anastasia Matsko in a year and a half.