The fog of war makes it difficult enough to know what is going on in Ukraine, but deliberate disinformation being shared by the Russian government and pro‑Russian social media users is tinting our view of events.
“Tidal waves of disinformation accompany crisis,” says Joan Donovan at Harvard University. For example, the Russian Embassy in the UK claimed in social media posts on 10 March, without providing credible evidence, that a pregnant woman injured in the bombing of a maternity hospital in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol was an actor. Twitter and Facebook removed the posts for being disinformative.
TikTok has also struggled with disinformation, from a falsified video of a paratrooper parachuting into Ukraine in the early days of the invasion to Russian influencers all giving the same pro-Russian speech in videos.
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“I’m a little shocked how much disinformation there is,” says Lukas Andriukaitis at the Atlantic Council, a US think tank. “It’s basically a fire hose of fake news.” The Atlantic Council has tracked disinformation for years through conflicts, including Syria, Libya, the Russian invasion of Crimea and the ongoing war in the Donbas region of Ukraine, but hasn’t seen as much disinformation being spread wittingly and unwittingly as today.
However, non-governmental organisations, researchers, social media platforms and journalists are calling out disinformation about the Russian invasion of Ukraine as it spreads across the internet. They do so using a combination of high-tech tools, intuition and plenty of practice.
There are two basic strategies pursued by organisations that aim to seek out and debunk disinformation, says Al Baker at Logically, an AI-powered fact-checking organisation in the UK. “You can either try to find disinformation narratives which are emerging or disinformation narratives gaining traction on social media networks you
would not normally expect them to have that sort of traction,” he says. The fake news is either spotted at the source or as it is beginning to gain ground in the mainstream.
Finding disinformation as it is created involves trawling through the murkier parts of the digital world. “There are elements of the internet where all people do is share things that are obviously false,” says Baker, pointing to groups on messaging app Telegram that are affiliated with QAnon, a conspiracy movement that has been described as a cult. “You don’t want to spend your time combing through those channels and debunking every single thing.”
Instead, a more targeted approach is sensible, tackling disinformation if it breaks out of those niche communities into the mainstream. Social media analytics tools such as BuzzSumo, Meltwater and CrowdTangle – which is owned by Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram – can track the spread of posts as they are shared by an increasing number of people.
“If we see something suspicious, then we can take a deeper look,” says Andriukaitis. At the Digital Forensic Research Lab, part of the Atlantic Council, he and his colleagues scrape data from social media and create maps of potential disinformation spreaders – people known to share inauthentic content.
Inadvertent dissemination of incorrect information is as big a challenge as state-sponsored attempts to muddy the waters, he says. “So many people are trying to do the right thing, but take information that hasn’t been verified and mislabel it, or share things that happened a while ago,” he says.
Debunking some claims can be difficult. “Generally, it’s not easy to prove that something is false,” says Baker. Some of the easiest things to disprove are photos or videos that claim to show one thing, but are falsified or repurposed. Take, for instance, footage that claims to show an ongoing attack, but is actually from a previous war or is even a clip from a video game.
Finding the original version that predates the claim can quash a rumour before it gains ground. That is often done by image-matching technology, by geolocating footage using image metadata or from details in the image. If a road sign in some footage is in Arabic, but the claim is that it is from Kyiv in Ukraine, it is probably from another time and place.
Truth may be harder to discern in other videos. “Twitter is flooded with amateur video footage,” says Baker. “One of the compounding factors is this is a war zone and there’s very little in the way of reliable, on-the-ground information you can verify independently or trust because it comes from reputable news organisations.”
Despite the challenges involved in debunking fake news, it is vital work. “My research team firmly believes we have a right to truth and the public has a right to the truth,” says Donovan. “If we give up that right, because social media as a technology is so chaotic and exploitable, then it’s only going to get worse.”
