Read special edition of Early Warnings on what to expect on the anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine (24 February 2023).
Ukraine
At times of crisis or conflict, disinformation can be rapidly generated and spread. Media literacy initiatives are a crucial pillar of the European strategy to combat disinformation, and must be equally rapidly generated and spread if they are effectively to reach audiences vulnerable to disinformation.
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.
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.
On April 3 international media started publishing videos and pictures of the massacre that took place in Bucha, a Ukrainian town in Kiev’s region.
This article has been originally published on the Italian fact-checking project Facta.news, part of the EDMO network, on April 4, 2022.
There is a lot of disturbing and potentially traumatizing digital material coming out of Ukraine, especially in the form of images and videos.
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.
