GTA 6 Ban Rumors Raise Questions About Source And Spread

I watched the GTA 6 ban story take shape the way many viral game news items do now, moving faster than verification. Reports began circulating that Grand Theft Auto 6 could be banned in Russia because the game allegedly includes scenes with male strippers. The claim landed as a familiar mix of culture-war framing and moral outrage, and it spread widely within days.

The story traces back to a single article published on Jan. 14 by the Russian site news.ru, via Polygon, which examined the claim and its origins. According to that article, news.ru said it interviewed Mikhail Ivanov, a deputy chairman of the World Russian People’s Council and a member of the Bryansk Regional Duma. Ivanov was presented as criticizing Rockstar Games for what he described as immoral content in the upcoming title.

“The creators of GTA VI are deliberately including destructive and vulgar content in their product, which is completely unacceptable to the moral health of society,” Ivanov said, according to a machine-translated quote published by news.ru. “This includes the planned inclusion of scenes of male striptease in the game, which is a direct and cynical violation of basic moral norms and traditional spiritual values. Allowing such content is tantamount to corrupting the younger generation. We need to either impose strict legal restrictions on the distribution of such games in Russia or require publishers to release special versions for our market, cleared of immoral content.”

— Mikhail Ivanov

Within days, the article was treated as fact. Sites including ComicBook, NME, TheGamer, GamingBible, Dexerto, and others published stories about a possible GTA 6 ban, almost all citing news.ru as their sole source. The coverage was syndicated further and amplified on X and Reddit. By Jan. 20, the claim had achieved full viral momentum.

Image: News.ru via Polygon

What stood out while following the spread was how little independent verification accompanied it. Polygon reported it was unable to confirm the legitimacy of Ivanov’s quote. Requests sent to both news.ru and Rockstar Games did not receive responses before publication. Despite that, the story continued to circulate, often stripped of any mention that its sourcing had not been confirmed.

Ivanov himself is not new to viral controversy. Searching his name on social platforms brings up a string of odd claims attributed to him over the past year, including proposals to ban Halloween and restrict internet access at night to raise Russia’s birthrate. Some of those stories were picked up by tabloids outside Russia. Many are also summarized by AI-generated responses on social platforms, which further normalize them as factual entries.

On Jan. 20, Ivanov was again cited by news.ru in a separate report claiming he called for bans on A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms and the next season of House of the Dragon, alleging the shows promoted false gods and threatened Christian values. Like the GTA 6 ban story, that report originated from the same site.

Polygon’s investigation dug deeper into news.ru itself. The outlet has a limited public footprint beyond its website and social accounts, which date back to 2017, and a YouTube channel created in 2021. It is frequently confused with NEWSru, an independent Russian news organization that shut down in 2021. Wikipedia explicitly notes that the two are not the same entity.

More significantly, Polygon found that news.ru appears in a 2022 report by Openfacto, a French nonprofit focused on open-source intelligence. That report examined a network of websites linked to Russian information operations and listed multiple sites using a news.ru domain structure, including news.ru, in archived versions reviewed by Polygon. Openfacto connected those sites to InfoRos, a news agency it says is run by Russia’s GRU intelligence service.

“By registering no fewer than 1,341 digital news portals attached to cities, towns, districts, or even villages, InfoRos has created a network of amplifiers that surreptitiously broadcast the Russian government’s preferred narrative,” Openfacto wrote in its 2022 report.

“The websites are primarily empty shells that regularly copy and paste innocuous content. These sites publish InfoRos content at regular intervals, which has a pro-government or anti-Western tone.”

— Openfacto

InfoRos has previously been accused by U.S. officials of spreading COVID-19 misinformation through its websites in 2020. Polygon contacted Openfacto to confirm whether the news.ru site that published the GTA 6 ban story matches the one identified in its research and said it would update readers if confirmation is received.

A separate 2022 study by Viginum, a French government agency monitoring foreign influence campaigns, identified a similar network called Portal Kombat. While news.ru was not directly listed as part of that operation, Viginum noted that the tactics used closely resembled those attributed to InfoRos, suggesting possible shared infrastructure or service providers.

“Although some information may seem innocuous, most of the content broadcast aims to primarily amplify the resentment of local Russian populations towards Ukrainian authorities and report on ongoing military operations.”

— Viginum

The relevance to a GTA 6 ban becomes clearer when viewed through that lens. According to Viginum, these networks intensified after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, using mass-produced content to influence search results, social media, and public discourse. A 2025 report from NewsGuard found that sites linked to Portal Kombat were responsible for hundreds of provably false claims and that their content was being scraped into AI training datasets.

I saw that feedback loop in real time with this story. AI-generated responses on X confidently repeated Ivanov’s alleged quote, sometimes linking directly to news.ru, other times citing secondary outlets that had already laundered the claim. The result was a closed circuit where repetition stood in for confirmation.

The GTA 6 ban rumor is low-stakes on its own, but it shows how easily a single unverified source can shape global conversation within days. The machinery that pushed this story works just as well for claims with far greater consequences.

Read also, Grand Theft Auto 6 leaks continue to surface, with a recent unverified collection of information outlining possible gameplay changes and Rockstar’s internal response, offering a detailed look at how GTA VI may evolve.