There were minor hints that the video was either outright staged (disinformation) or somewhat manipulated (malinformation). Some Twitter users pointed to the blond tips of Nika’s hair, which differed from the hair style of the person in the footage. The unusually high-resolution quality of the footage was another hint, although the date and camera name labels seemed compatible with the suicide theory. Also suspicious was that “Nika” removed the black mask from her face as soon as she entered the alley and faced the CCTV camera. Some users also suggested that the footage was genuine, but that the date and the time labels were modified.

Nevertheless, the report and footage were convincing enough to cause deep doubts, thereby calm things down on the street for the next couple of days.

It was perhaps the efficacy of this information operation that provoked Nika’s mother, who was not in custody, to deny all the claims in the report in a self-recorded video, posted online. She said Nika had her ID and phone with her when she left to join the protests and that she was killed the same night in the street, and her body was taken to a morgue right away by the police. She said she had seen her body in the morgue nine days later and, apart from her damaged head and face, there were no other injuries. She noted that the morgue authorities were ordered not to contact the family even though they had already identified Nika’s body, using the ID in her bag. She confirmed seeing the autopsy report, which identified “blow to the head by a hard object” as the official cause of death and insisted that Nika’s aunt and uncle’s false confessions were taken under duress.

Despite the back and forth between Nika’s family and the state, the regime’s achievement with this info-op, centered around fabricated CCTV footage, was significant. This footage not only weakened the prospect of a new wave of young street protestors, but also frightened parents whose young kids were showing up every night in the protests. If the latter function was unintentional in the first couple of weeks, later it became a common tactic: to delegate the crackdown to the parents—something that can be called “two-step control.” The term is inspired by a famous communication theory from the 1950s by Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld which refers to how the media often influences the public indirectly through political or cultural elites—and now increasingly through celebrities, who then convey those media messages to their audiences.