Russia-Ukraine war: It’s your responsibility to stop disinformation

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Wednesday, March 9, 2022

Shutting down disinformation online is up to you

While swiping through TikTok last week, I spotted a video of a Ukrainian fighter jet knocking a Russian fighter out of the sky. The scene initially shocked me. But the TikTok of the so-called “Ghost of Ukraine” actually came from a video game.

Lies about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine spread quickly these days on social media. One post falsely identified a Palestinian girl confronting Israeli soldiers as a Ukrainian child challenging Russian troops. Somebody else might post phony tweets supposedly from Russian diplomats. Others might portray the war as a hoax.

Facebook (FB), TikTok, Twitter (TWTR), or YouTube (GOOG, GOOGL) may try to clamp down on lies, but social media giants will never stop disinformation completely. The endless falsehoods about the pandemic and the 2020 election demonstrate that much. That means it’s up to you to stop the spread of fake content.

“Every individual has some responsibility, and there's definitely things they can do to prevent the spread of misinformation,” explained Gabrielle Lim, an associate at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab.

While it’s a lot easier to spread disinformation than stop it, users themselves could be the best tools for purging social media of a mounting pile of lies, particularly about the war.

Videos and photos are often real, but their descriptions aren’t

Let’s start with the most compelling false content online: visual disinformation. According to USC Viterbi School of Engineering professor Wael AbdAlmageed, visual disinformation comes in two main varieties — repurposed media and fake media.

Repurposed media takes a real photo or video and re-captions it to fit another group’s narrative.

“For example, somebody will claim that a [video of a] Ukrainian soldier killing somebody in Russia [is] why Russia invaded Ukraine,” AbdAlmageed said. “The video itself might actually be correct, but it might be from a completely different part of the world that doesn't have anything to do with Ukraine or Russia.”

You’ve likely come across images and videos like this either during the war in Ukraine or the pandemic. It’s easy to fall for these images, because the picture or video itself is real — the poster has just stripped it of its context.

Outside of repurposed media, watch out for manipulated media, or videos and photos that others have either concocted or altered to change their meaning. These can include the aforementioned Ghost of Kyiv, or deepfake videos using artificial intelligence to create digital versions of world leaders or celebrities who say or do things that never happened.