Invasion of Ukraine: Propaganda, Fake Video about Russia attacking Bombard social network users

The messages, videos and pictures flying on Twitter, Facebook and Telegram are much more than the air strikes that are pouring down on Ukraine. They claim to show Russian warplanes being shot down or Ukrainians dodging to hide in their own homes. Some are real, horrifying images of this war. Others have been lurking on the Internet for years before Russia launched its biggest attack on a European country since World War Two.

The invasion of Ukraine is shaping up to be Europe’s first major armed conflict in the age of social media, when the small screen of smartphones is the dominant communication tool, bringing with it the risk of contagion. Instantly spreading dangerous, even deadly, misinformation. .

TikTok Propaganda videos, headlines, and tweets blaring across screens around the world are leaving millions bewildered as to how this battle is actually unfolding. Across Telegram and TwitterRussia’s attack on Ukraine is both “unprovoked” and “necessary”, depending on who sent the message.

“The world’s prayers are with the people of Ukraine tonight as they suffer an unprovoked and unjustified attack by Russian military forces,” President Joe Biden tweeted Wednesday night. for his 40 million followers.

However, Russian state media echoed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s comments on its platforms, with RT News declaring to its hundreds of thousands of followers on Telegram that the action was “necessary”.

Over the past few days, Putin and the Russian media have been churning out false accusations that Ukrainians are committing genocide and misjudging much of the country’s population as Nazis, said Bret Schafer, who head of the information manipulation team at the Alliance for Guarantee of Democracy, said. nonpartisan thought organization in Washington.

For example, last week, the news director of RT claimed on live television, without proof, that Ukrainians could start gassing themselves.

“You really saw this escalation of the narrative that Russia needed to protect from the Nazi mobs of genocidal Ukrainians,” Schafer said.

As Thursday passed, the truth became even harder for the rest of the world with hundreds of misleading tweets, deceptively edited videos and out-of-context photos emerging after the The first shot of the war broke out.

A clip, taken from a video game, has racked up millions of views when users falsely claimed it depicted real attacks. A video recorded by the AP news agency in Libya more than a decade ago was captured on Facebook and Twitter on Thursday, with users saying it shows a Russian fighter jet plummeting from the gray sky. to the ground after being shot down by Ukrainian forces. And some TikTok users mistakenly believed they were watching a video of soldiers parachuting into Ukraine after a Russian account posted old footage of the Russian invasion in progress – that didn’t stop the clip. attracted more than 22 million views before the end of the day. .

John Silva, senior director of the News Literacy Project, a nonprofit that works to combat misinformation through education, said people who view these videos, photos and statements online are likely to will watch them, share them and move on with their lives.

“We saw a paratrooper, he spoke Russian, so we didn’t take the time to question that,” Silva said. “If we see something new to us, we are forced to share it with others.”

And while some users unwittingly spread rumors in the hopes of shaping perception of the invasion, others are betting on the idea that they can trick social media users into unknowingly sharing. deviation.

“We know that disinformation will be coming from the Russian government,” Silva said. “Then you also have trolls – people who just put things out there to see if they can fool people.” People are consuming these misleading claims because they are desperate for information, said Schafer of the Democratic Confidentiality Coalition. “You have a spike in demand, a low supply of reliable information, and a lot of sketchy information filling the void,” he added.

That gap widened on Thursday as internet outages spread across some parts of Ukraine, making it even harder for people there to contact loved ones or keep up with the news.

According to a post by Pavel Durov, one of the founders of Telegram, the app experienced service interruptions when a lot of people tried to access Telegram, a popular messaging and social media platform. in Eastern Europe.

Important Russian websites, including the main Kremlin and military websites, were also inaccessible or slow to load after what appeared to be a retaliatory attack. And American officials blame Russia for disabling major government websites in Ukraine.

Alp Toker, founder of NetBlocks, a London-based company that monitors network outages and internet access around the world, said Alp Toker.

While some of the outages could have been caused by artillery shells or air strikes, others were part of a deliberate attempt by Russian forces to disrupt communications and cause panic, he said. .

“Hit by stroke, the human impact of being disconnected at a time like this is a terrifying experience,” he said. “It makes sense from a tactical point of view. We know that this is a strategy.”