It’s the story that has gripped the world over the past month - the eruption of war between Russia and Ukraine after Russia’s invasion five weeks ago. Thanks to social media, we are seeing the events of this conflict unfold in real-time, and while this constant stream of information being made readily available to us can be useful, it also brings with it a torrent of misinformation unlike anything we’ve seen before.
Firstly, it’s important to have a clear understanding of the different terms thrown about to describe unreliable information in the media:
Misinformation - an umbrella, or general, term, used to describe false or misleading content, or content which has been taken out of context.
Disinformation - a deliberate attempt to mislead using content which the distributor knows to be untrue. Material fitting into this category is designed to be widely shared and is often done so with the intention of persuading people to think a certain way, or just because a distributor can make money from advertising each time someone clicks on a story.
“Fake news” - a somewhat vague but colloquial term used across many languages to dismiss stories as being untrue (regardless of whether they are factual or not). It is most commonly used by politicians and activists to discredit their opponents. The term was first popularised by U.S. President Donald Trump, and was subsequently named the 2017 “Word of the Year” by the Collins Dictionary, after it registered a 365% usage rise that year.
Indeed, this idea of misinformation is a relatively recent one, only becoming apparent in the last 5 or so years, whether through the presidential run of 2016, the pandemic beginning in 2019 or the storming of the Capitol in 2021. However, it seems the web is, at present, awash with misleading and false material onan unprecedented scale.
Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine on the 24th February, and within mere hours, misleading and unverified videos of alleged attacks on Ukrainian cities had been seen by hundreds of thousands of people.
One of the first such videos to be shared on Twitter was supposedly of a large explosion in an unnamed Ukrainian city, which to date has received over 112,000 views. It was posted with the caption “"when the rich wage war it's the poor who die"”, alongside tags such as “#PUTIN”, “#JoeBiden” and “#NATO”.
In reality, the footage actually dates back to 2015, and depicts an explosion at a storage facility in Tianjin, China, which reportedly killed 173 people.
This is just one example of the type of deception, whether intentional or not, being instigated by users of platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and - most popular among the young and impressionable - Tiktok. More and more frequently, we’re seeing footage from previous conflicts, military exercises, films and even video games taken out of context and masqueraded as reliable depictions of the situation in Ukraine. So why is misinformation so rife in this conflict?
Well, one reason is because people are arguably more aware of the situation in Ukraine than they have been with any other war in recent history, largely because of this aforementioned abundance of information available online. Another reason is that the heartbreaking nature of the matter at hand makes users more likely to share posts and videos of the conflict, as Claire Wardle, Brown University professor and US director of the nonprofit First Draft News explains: “People feel helpless…they're sharing things that they think are true because they're trying to be helpful".
There are other reasons that misinformation is such a common occurrence on the internet: some people are simply after “likes” and “shares”, and will exploit the suffering of others to get them, whilst, as already touched on, some are just out to make a quick buck from having people visit their sites which share false information.
The involvement of Russian state media - known for allegedly intentionally spreading false information and propaganda - too, has added another layer beneath which users of social media must dig to uncover the truth.
An instance of this blurred distinction between fact and fiction was the emergent news of the bombing of a hospital in Mariupol on the 10th March. According to Ukrainian authorities, the attack killed 3 people and left 17 others injured. The Kremlin, however, responded to images of casualties by claiming that the facility was empty when it was targeted, that it was a front for ultra-nationalist Ukrainian militias and that the viral photo of an injured pregnant woman being carried on a stretcher in fact depicted a paid actor.
So what can we do to prevent ourselves from being caught in this web of lies, and to sort the fact from the fiction?
The BBC released an article detailing “How to spot false posts from Ukraine”, which advises social media users to do their own research (such as using reverse image searches) into the legitimacy of content and to think twice before sharing it. Furthermore, Marianna Spring, a specialist disinformation reporter, has also created a 5-episode podcast called “War on Truth”, which reports on the battle between fact and fiction in the light of Russia-Ukraine conflict, and hears true stories from the victims of it.
One thing has become increasingly apparent in the wake of this conflict, playing out on a global scale: the battle to control the narrative of war is one which is becoming ever more crucial, and which will be reflected in how the events of late are immortalised in history.
