8 | New Scientist | 19 March 2022
News focus Ukraine invasion
THE fog of war makes it difficult
enough to know what is going
on in Ukraine, but deliberate
disinformation being shared
by the Russian government and
pro-Russia social media users
is tinting our view of events.
“Tidal waves of disinformation
accompany crisis,” says Joan
Donovan at Harvard University.
For example, the Russian Embassy
in the UK claimed in social media
posts on 10 March, without
providing credible evidence,
that a pregnant woman injured
in the bombing of a maternity
hospital in the Ukrainian city of
Mariupol was an actor. Twitter
and Facebook removed the
posts for being disinformative.
TikTok has also struggled with
disinformation, from a falsified
video of a paratrooper parachuting
into Ukraine in the early days
of the invasion to Russian
influencers all giving the same
pro-Russia speech in videos.Spot it at the source
“I’m a little shocked how much
disinformation there is,” says
Lukas Andriukaitis at the Atlantic
Council, a US think tank. “It’s
basically a fire hose of fake news.”
The Atlantic Council has tracked
disinformation for years through
conflicts, including Syria, Libya,
the Russian invasion of Crimea
and the ongoing war in the
Donbas region of Ukraine,
but has never seen as much
disinformation being spread
wittingly and unwittingly as today.
However, non-governmental
organisations, researchers, social
media platforms and journalists
are calling out disinformation
about the Russian invasion of
Ukraine as it spreads across the
internet. They do so using a
combination of high-tech tools,
intuition and plenty of practice.There are two basic strategies
pursued by organisations that
aim to seek out and debunk
disinformation, says Al Baker
at Logically, an AI-powered
fact-checking organisation in the
UK. “You can either try to find
disinformation narratives which
are emerging or disinformation
narratives gaining traction
on social media networks you
would not normally expect them
to have that sort of traction,”
he says. The fake news is either
spotted at the source or as it
is beginning to gain ground
in the mainstream.
Finding disinformation as it is
created involves trawling through
the murkier parts of the digital
world. “There are elements of
the internet where all people do
is share things that are obviously
false,” says Baker, pointing to
groups on messaging app Telegram
that are affiliated with QAnon, a
conspiracy movement that has
been described as a cult. “You don’t
want to spend your time combing
through those channels and
debunking every single thing.”
Instead, a more targetedapproach is sensible, tackling
disinformation if it breaks out
of those niche communities into
the mainstream. Social media
analytics tools such as BuzzSumo,
Meltwater and CrowdTangle –
which is owned by Meta,
the owner of Facebook and
Instagram – can track the spread
of posts as they are shared by an
increasing number of people.
“If we see something suspicious,
then we can take a deeper look,”
says Andriukaitis. At the DigitalForensic Research Lab, part of
the Atlantic Council, he and
his colleagues scrape data from
social media and create maps
of potential disinformation
spreaders – people known to
share inauthentic content.
Inadvertent dissemination
of incorrect information is as big
a challenge as state-sponsored
attempts to muddy the waters,
he says. “So many people aretrying to do the right thing,
but take information that hasn’t
been verified and mislabel it,
or share things that happened
a while ago,” he says.
Debunking some claims can be
difficult. “Generally, it’s not easy to
prove that something is false,” says
Baker. Some of the easiest things
to disprove are photos or videos
that it is claimed show one thing,
but are falsified or repurposed.
Take, for instance, footage that
claims to show an ongoing attack,
but is actually from a previous war
or is even a clip from a video game.
Finding the original version
that predates the claim can quash
a rumour before it gains ground.
That is often done by image-
matching technology, by
geolocating footage using image
metadata or from details in the
image. If a road sign in some
footage is in Arabic, but the claim
is that it is from Kyiv in Ukraine,
it is probably from another time
and place.
Truth may be harder to
discern in other videos. “Twitter
is flooded with amateur video
footage,” says Baker. “One of the
compounding factors is this is a
war zone and there’s very little in
the way of reliable, on-the-ground
information you can verify
independently or trust because
it comes from reputable news
organisations.”
Despite the challenges involved
in debunking fake news, it is
essential work. “My research team
firmly believes we have a right
to truth and the public has a right
to the truth,” says Donovan. “If we
give up that right – because social
media as a technology is so chaotic
and exploitable – then it’s only
going to get worse.” ❚TechnologyPA
IMAGES/AL
AMYHow to fight disinformation
Researchers and fact checkers are debunking a huge amount of online propaganda
and fake news about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, reports Chris Stokel-WalkerA protest in Dublin,
Ireland, against the
war in Ukraine“ I’m a little shocked at
how much disinformation
there is. It’s basically a
fire hose of fake news”