People are consuming these misleading claims because they are desperate for information, Schafer of the Alliance for Securing Democracy said. “Then you also have trolls - people who just put things out there to see if they can fool people.” “We know disinformation is going to come out of the Russian government,” Silva said. “If we see a piece of information that’s new to us, we have this compulsion to share it with others.”Īnd while some users are unintentionally spreading rumors in hopes of shaping perception of the invasion, others are betting on the idea that they can dupe unwitting social media users into sharing the falsehoods. “We see a paratrooper, he’s speaking Russian, and so we don’t take the time to question it,” said Silva. People who see these videos, photos and claims online are likely to watch them, share them and move on with their day, said John Silva, a senior director of the News Literacy Project, a nonprofit that works to fight misinformation through education. And some TikTok users wrongly believed they were watching a video of soldiers parachuting into Ukraine after a Russian account posted years-old footage while Russia’s invasion was underway - that didn’t stop the clip from racking up more than 22 million views before the day’s end. A video captured by The Associated Press in Libya more than a decade ago was revived across Facebook and Twitter Thursday, with users saying it showed a Russian fighter jet plummeting through gray skies to the ground after being shot down by Ukrainian forces. One clip, taken from a video game, amassed millions of views as users falsely claimed it depicted real attacks.
“You’ve really seen this escalation of the narrative that Russia needs to protect from this Nazi mob of genocidal Ukrainians,” Schafer said.Īs Thursday wore on, the truth became even more difficult for the rest of the world to disentangle from a string of hundreds of misleading tweets, deceptively edited videos and out-of-context photos that emerged after the first shots of war rang out. Last week, for example, RT’s news director claimed on live television, without evidence, that Ukrainians might start gassing their own people. Over the last few days, Putin and Russian media have ramped up false accusations that Ukrainians are committing genocide, and mischaracterizing the majority of the country’s population as Nazis, said Bret Schafer, who heads the information manipulation team at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington. Russian state media, however, echoed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s comments across its platforms, with RT News blasting to hundreds of thousands of followers on Telegram that the action was “necessary.” Ukraine war thrusts German climate action into spotlight