Canucks: No, Kirill Kudryavtsev isn’t a miraculous blood donor

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If you came across a story about how a young hockey player had a rare blood type and had done everything he could to donate said blood as often as possible, helping all kinds of people in hospital, you’d feel pretty good, right?

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Of course you would. We want to project the best things onto others. We want everyone to have the best intentions, and to do the best they can.

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Especially when those efforts are outside that person’s usual sphere, in this case to help society, not just play a sport.

That is the premise that was presented to a number of Vancouver Canucks fans on Facebook this week — that defence prospect Kirill Kudryavtsev, who made his NHL debut late last season, is a special kind of hero.

“In the past five years, he has quietly carried out a journey full of love — donating blood nearly 100 times to children with cancer, carrying a rare blood line, he has contributed to building a future for the less fortunate,” read the post.

Sounds lovely. Too bad it’s not true.

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“Not true,” a team spokesperson confirmed. (Logic alone should make you skeptical, even without confirming the truth — even if he did have a rare blood type, it’s hard to fathom how a professional athlete, aged just 21, could have donated blood so many times already in his young life.)

Followers and non-followers of the fan page saw the post. And of course many comments took the report at face value. In my interactions, I’ve found Kudryavtsev to be a conscientious and polite young man, with a good chance of playing more NHL games. But the story is still nonsense.

A look at the account shows mostly legitimate, although regurgitated, almost certainly through AI, Canucks news items. None of the reporting is original, just notes on things reported elsewhere. Of course, the page wouldn’t be able to link to the original reporting in Canada, because Meta chose in 2023 to ban Canadian news links from Facebook and Instagram rather than have to pay Canadian news sites, which they would be required to do under the Online News Act.

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Pages that look like this Canucks one have become common across Facebook, covering all kinds of media — not just sports. In many cases, these pages are actually up to other things, explained Chris Tenove, assistant director of the University of B.C.’s Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions.

You may recall pages and posts that were made to look like legitimate news sites, with scandalous headlines about Canadian celebrities.

“We saw this during the general election, but they were just funnelling people to crypto scam sites,” he said. The Canucks page in question for this story does not appear to be operating like this, but it could very well be for another purpose. In some cases, the page’s creator is playing a bit of a long game, where they will build up a following and then turn the page into something totally different, perhaps even selling its operations to another agency.

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“What also happens is they will get flipped to other things. Like there was a parenting page, pulling in Canadians, that flipped to a page promoting 51st state rhetoric,” he said. “So you get state actors, but also just small-time grifters who are just looking to make a buck.”

The contact information on this particular Canucks page lists an address and phone number that are in fact a recreation centre in Dallas, Texas. The links the page uses directs to a website that is filled with what appears to be a broad range of AI-regenerated sports stories. In the old days, we might have called this a content farm.

Even if this particular effort at drawing fan attention on Facebook is less nefarious, it’s still a diminishment in our online experience.

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Before going into academia, Tenove was a journalist, and one of the places he worked at was Adbusters, the anti-capitalist magazine that has long devoted itself to challenging consumer culture.

Tenove thought of the Adbusters concept of the “mental environment, the broader environment we’re in.”

“The people behind these pages are trying to grab little bits of our attention, to shake a little more views, a few more followers, to a page they can sell,” he said. “And so we’re seeing lots of AI eye-grabbing stories with recognizable personalities to funnel people toward scams.

“The end result is people becoming more uncertain of what they’re seeing,” he said. Healthy skepticism is important, but this is a much more nefarious thing, he added.

And further, there is a positive premise that could have been on the table here, even if the root story was false.

“It’s a little bit sad. This effort is instead muddying what should be a nice message about the importance of blood donation.”

pjohnston@postmedia.com

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