FAFO Reality Check

So what is Pekka’s story? Is he truly pursuing a noble cause or is he just another grifter who was looking to capitalize on a hot “trend” and was finally able to hit the jackpot by being in the right place at the right time? To understand a man, it’s important to understand his beginnings. So let us give you a little introduction to his background. As we mentioned earlier, Pekka comes from a small town in North-Eastern Finland. His immediate family may be of humble means, but they appear loving, supportive, community-focused, passionate about the musical arts and are close with their large extended family across Finland and beyond. Of note, anything to establish their connection to Pekka has been carefully wiped from their socials. Finding out who is who in the Kallioniemi clan presented some challenges, even though Pekka happens to be a carbon-copy of his dad, but where there is a will there's a way and soon, we were able to make the connections between the immediate and extended family members. Kuusamo’s history has deep and complicated ties with Russia but Pekka’s mom, when she was a secretary to the town’s mayor, was keen on brushing up on her Russian language skills in anticipation of the regional cooperation initiative prior to the border crossing opening. His mom and one of his sister’s studied and speak at least some basic Russian. His younger sister married an expat from the UK and lives in an Eastern European country that isn’t rabidly anti-Russian. Some of his family members appear to be supportive of Ukraine, at least at the height of the 2022 mania, but nothing indicates fanaticism. Pekka’s one uncle does seem to show some sympathy towards the Nazi occupiers during WWII, but we didn’t bother dwelling too deep into it, yet. Pekka, you should be able to recognize some familiar faces in this picture. 5/

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Let’s get the boring part over with, looking at Pekka’s active research topics prior to 2022, social media, specifically in the context of disinformation, is virtually non-existent. His Tampere University research portal doesn’t make mention of it and while his other public profiles list social media, algorithms, and disinformation as his key areas of interest, his actual research output doesn’t match those key words. The lack of historical publication history on the subject matter and only one recent publication on “Facebook’s Dark Pattern Design, Public Relations and Internal Work Culture” from 2022 does not quite support his claim of him dedicating his academic career to these subjects as being true. 4/

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Pekka has been very consistent with his new origin story. To summarize his claims: 1. He has been anti-social media for quite some time; 2. Social media has been and is the primary focus of his academic research; 3. After the full-scale invasion, he felt compelled to do something to help Ukraine, so he created his Twitter account and became a social media warrior. In his own words “I created my Twitter account soon after Russia launched its full-scale invasion in Ukraine. I wanted to look for ways to support Ukraine, and as I had previously done extensive research on social media, I thought that I could try to use Twitter to spread awareness about Russia’s information operations. After a while, I got interested in the people who promote Kremlin’s narratives and started doing short threads on them. For some reason, they quickly became quite popular, and as of today, there are already over 230 entries of Vatnik Soup. I am mostly motivated by my own interest on the topic, but as the impact of these threads grew, I also started getting positive feedback, which kept me going.” Pekka’s current surface-level digital footprint would largely support these claims which in-turn make him appear both credible and genuine. To his credit, someone did put in a great amount of effort in making the old Pekka’s digital footprint, including any links to his private life, quite difficult to find, but they were sloppy nonetheless and left too many little crumbs to follow. So is Pekka credible and genuine? It’s now up to you to decide. 3 /

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We bet that you’re all curious as to how a small-town boy from Kuusamo in North-East Finland, a mere 60 kms from the Russian border, morphed into the guy in this video. Luckily, we were curious too and since we are an abundantly generous bunch, you too, will be left more than sated. 2/

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Pekka Kallioniemi (@p_kallioniemi), the “internet personality” who “created” the Vatnik Soup series and the self-professed Russian disinformation warrior, rose from relative obscurity to coveted subject matter expert and NAFO’s favorite poster boy within a relatively short time frame. Not one to let a great grift go to waste, even if it meant that he would ironically become a useful idiot himself, Pekka finally found the shortcut to achieving his purpose in life. To set himself apart from the other disinformation “warriors”, Pekka found an untapped corner of the informational warfare market and was subsequently promoted to being the public face of a far more sinister operation, an operation which graduated from relatively harmless “exposés” of public individuals (fair game) to doxing private, anonymous individuals whose online presence, platforms and reach were deemed to be a threat to the Ukrainian cause. The more viral the “soups” became, the less attention was paid to factually countering the “offending” narratives, with the focus instead shifting to inflicting real-world harm through a calculated triad of soft and hard doxing meant to deprive the soup’s subjects of their right to exercise free speech and to ultimately intimidate and bully them into silence. So, buckle-up and put on your dancing shoes our fellow vatniks and victims, karma is about to serve an assortment of amuse-bouches, whether the main course (and it’s delicious) gets served is up to Pekka. 1/