This is an extract from this month’s edition of The Journal’s monthly FactCheck newsletter, which looks at what misinformation is being shared right now and points at trends in factchecking. Find out more and sign up here or at the bottom of the page. You can also read the full edition of this month’s newsletter here.
THERE IS NO shortage of adages about the demise of facts during wartime, but the most important truth is still evident: what is happening in Ukraine is a catastrophe.
It almost feels flippant to write about the conflict of information from the comfort of a home office while reading about half a million people having fled Ukraine, seeing images of someone’s home crushed beneath an aircraft, or hearing Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky tell the world that he expects to be assassinated by Russia.
And yet disinformation is such a massive part of what’s going on in Ukraine at the moment. The Observer’s Carole Cadwalladr has even described last week’s events as being part of “the first Great Information War”, something which began with the conflict fomented by Russia in the Donbas region in east Ukraine in 2014.
Over the past eight years, pro-Kremlin outlets have repeatedly published false claims that Ukraine has committed atrocities against the Russian-speaking population that lives in the so-called ‘breakaway’ republics of Donetsk and Luhansk that make up Donbas. That is despite evidence that Russia has been heavily involved in the conflict since it began.
In recent weeks, Vladimir Putin has leaned on disinformation narratives about Ukraine and its treatment of those in the Donbas region to justify the Russian invasion.
He has parroted a claim that has been made repeatedly over the years that Ukraine is carrying out “genocide” in Donbas. On the eve of the invasion, he suggested that Ukraine was about to attack the region and initiated a mass evacuation of its residents before approving a move to send in Russian troops as ‘peacekeepers’. And as 150,000 Russian troops amassed near Ukraine’s borders, Russian media painted NATO as the aggressor and suggested the country would not have felt threatened if the bloc had not broken its promise not to expand east, even though such a promise was never made.
In his speech announcing the war, Putin continued to lie about Ukraine’s history as he justified his country’s attack on a sovereign nation. He falsely suggested that modern Ukraine is a Nazi state that is a hotbed of far-right groups, despite evidence to the contrary. And he further claimed that Ukraine has no right to exist as a modern state because it is historically a Russian country, when the reality is far from the truth.
Much of what Putin says is intended for a domestic audience, and state-controlled media in Russia have cultivated his claims to build support for a war that has been heavily criticised in the West.
Yet it would be naive to think that Irish audiences are somehow immune to falsehoods about the conflict just because they are not the target of Putin’s claims, or because the war is happening somewhere else.
False claims thrive in moments of uncertainty when people are scrambling for information about a big event, particularly when people go looking on social media.
The invasion by Russia at the end of last week created the perfect storm for disinformation narratives to take hold. It produced a massive glut of voices and news reports alongside a wave of images and videos in two foreign languages that use an unfamiliar script. I cannot begin to describe how overwhelming it has been sifting through information over the past seven days, and the additional caution that I and my colleagues have had to take to ensure that what we’re reporting has been verified and that we’re not inadvertently sharing propaganda or fake content.
Even prominent outlets were caught out by a story about Ukrainian soldiers on Snake Island who did not actually refuse to surrender or tell Russian sailors to “go fuck themselves”.
It is a relatively inconsequential example, but one fears what might have been had the same mistake been made about stories shared by pro-Russia outlets before the invasion, like ones which claimed that Ukrainian ‘saboteurs’ planned to carry out terrorist attacks in the Donbas, or that Ukraine was planning false flag events as an excuse for a conflict with Russia.
These are indicative examples of what are only the opening stages of the so-called ‘Information War’, in which a new front has already opened in Ireland.
The Russian embassy has repeatedly tried to sow doubt into Irish minds about what is happening in Ukraine and elsewhere in recent weeks. We have seen the repetition of Russian narratives that neo-Nazis are responsible for the conflict or that Russia was not conducting air or missile strikes on Ukrainian cities after the invasion last Thursday. But we have also heard Russian ambassador Yuri Filatov tell news outlets that his country was not about to carry out naval drills off the south-west coast or invade Ukraine, when it was clearly about to do so.
These are the same tactics we have seen used by others who have in recent years attempted to cultivate distrust in established media outlets, like Donald Trump and far right groups. But the context now is different and arguably far more complicated because the conflict is moving so quickly and largely alien to Irish audiences.
RTÉ’s David McCullagh had done his homework before his live debunking of Filatov on last Friday’s Six One that went viral, but others may be less prepared in the weeks and months to come.
European officials briefed reporters across the continent, including The Journal, last week about Russia’s disinformation tactics regarding Ukraine and likened it to throwing mud at a wall and seeing what would stick. They said that there is a clear playbook being used by these groups and warned that no country is immune, as much as its citizens might think they are.
If things continue as those officials think that it will, the Great Information War will soon become quite a dirty one.
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