Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, on February 24, a large number of accounts, whose main goal was to spread pro-Russian disinformation, were detected on Twitter. Many of these profiles are suspected to be bots, but a large part could also be managed by actual human beings that act coordinately to spread false or misleading narratives about the conflict.
Ukraine
The Global Disinformation Index (GDI) is a member of the EDMO task force on Ukraine and has been tracking the monetisation of harmful disinformation on the conflict in Ukraine for over a month.
There is a lot of disturbing and potentially traumatizing digital material coming out of Ukraine, especially in the form of images and videos.
Insights highlighting the main disinformation trends related to the war in Ukraine will be published once a week.
The European Digital Media Observatory website, along other EDMO hubs website, had been made unavailable as a probable consequence of malicious actions.
From spreading falsehoods like “COVID-19 does not exist” or “vaccines carry killer chips”, some bad actors have turned quasi automatically to a full-hearted defense of the Russian attack on Ukraine based on disinformation. The largest Telegram pandemic conspiracy groups now defend Putin and his invasion. And they do so with hoaxes. At Maldita.es we are going to tell you how 10 of the most followed channels do it, all of them within 9,000 to 240,000 followers.
The events in Ukraine are heartbreaking, concerning and almost impossible to believe at times, even for those who have been watching the region closely.
A new taskforce will steer and collect material to help understand disinformation trends in the war in Ukraine.
In #UkraineFacts – an initiative led by the Spanish fact-checking organization Maldita.es, with the contribution of tens of signatories of the International fact-checking network (Ifcn)’s code – you will find out in which countries each disinformation content has been detected and access the debunks of the different fact-checking organizations that have investigated it.
After weeks of tensions, on 24 February 2022, Russian armed forces invaded Ukraine. As soon as the war in Ukraine began, disinformation also started spreading: false images, decontextualized videos, or plainly invented pieces of information invaded the internet and, in some cases, ended up on traditional media channels as well.