Imagine an entire country where variants of Fox News were all you could get.
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A “hi-tech robot” shown on Russian state television has turned out to be a man in a suit.
Russia-24 praised the ersatz android during coverage of a youth forum dedicated to robotics, boasting that “Robot Boris has already learned to dance and he’s not that bad”.
But sharp-eyed bloggers were dubious. The Russian website TJournal listed questions about the robot’s performance: Where were Boris’s external sensors? Why did the robot make so many “unnecessary movements” while dancing?
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The state-run Channel One was forced to apologise last week for a fake report showing a young Ukrainian man complaining about progress since the country’s revolution five years ago. The man turned out to be Belarusian, and told RFE/RL he was “totally ashamed” for taking part in the report.
And why did the robot look like a person would fit perfectly inside of it?
Later, photographs of the “robot” posted on social media showed the very visible neckline of the person in the suit.
Boris turned out to be an “Alyosha the Robot” costume made by a company called Show Robots.
