Tips for Navigating the Social Media ‘Fog of War’ as Russia Invades Ukraine

(CNN) — From a media perspective, what distinguishes Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is the sheer amount of information on social media. The staggering amount of data. Some of them are reliable, some of them are misinformation, some of them are pure misinformation. On Thursday, Slate’s Daniel Johnson, a US Army veteran, wrote that Ukraine “it could be the most documented war in the history of mankind”. The content is all over TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and other platforms.

“If you’re interested,” he wrote, “you can find footage of air strikes, ground battles, Russian helicopters shot down, civilians being attacked. Most of it is not from traditional sources. The amount of information flowing live is so great that there are entire accounts on social media dedicated to analyzing Russian and Ukrainian combat strength, front lines, and equipment losses down to the vehicle. This amount of widely available information is unheard of for a major conflict.”

Craig Timberg and Drew Harwell of The Washington Post also wrote about this dynamic on Thursday. They said that sites like “Twitter, Telegram and Twitch make monitoring the war quicker and easier than ever, but they are also vulnerable to rapid disinformation.” The key quote: The intensity and immediacy of social media “are creating a new kind of fog of war, in which information and disinformation are continually entangled with each other, clarifying and confusing almost equally.” For example: “Accounts supporting Russia have already gone to work sharing old videos and photos — taken out of context and repackaged with false descriptions — at the same time and with the same hashtags than authentic images of real-world people.

This is how to navigate social networks right now

With all of this in mind, here are some expert tips on how to navigate social media—and avoid unintentionally amplifying disinformation—during a major news event like the Ukraine attack:

• First and foremost: be skeptical. Pay attention to the propaganda. Think twice before hitting send or share. “If you’re online, you’re a potential stooge in the information war,” commented Professor Jennifer Mercieca.
• David French, veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and editor-in-chief of The Dispatch, wrote: “View battlefield reports with extreme caution. The fog of war makes it difficult for even combatants to understand what is happening in real time. As dense as the fog is on the battlefield, it is almost infinitely more opaque ” on sites like Twitter.
• Professor and disinformation expert Kate Starbird said on Twitter that consumers should “be wary of unknown accounts.” Check their profile, Starbird wrote: “Are they new? Or do they have few followers? What were they tweeting a couple of weeks or months ago? Make sure they are who they say they are. If you’re not sure, it’s okay not to retweet.”
• Christiaan Triebert of The New York Times Visual Investigations Team recommended: “Do a reverse image search with Google and Yandex.” This is a good tip for images that seem especially striking or surprising. “If nothing shows up, put the image in front of a mirror” and try again, he said. Storyful’s Rob McDonagh he pointed that you can do the same with the screenshots of the videos.
• CNN’s Daniel Dale said that there are “old war clips circulating on social media that are titled as new. There are also new clips that are titled authoritatively, by people who are not on the scene, even though it is not clear what what happened (which side fired, what was fired, etc.). A lot of caution.”

• As always, be wary of anyone who asks you for money. NBC’s Kat Tenbarge and Ben Collins reported that some TikTokers they pretended to broadcast live from Ukraine and solicited donations, using doctored or dubbed footage.
• An hour after the military action, Twitter Safety shared Tips for securing accounts in English, Russian, and Ukrainian. One of the recipients: Ukrainians who may need to erase digital evidence of their past political activism.
• Facebook created a “Special Operations Center” to respond to war-related activity on the platform. One of the priorities: “remove content that violates our Community Guidelines faster.” Facebook also said it activated “a new feature in Ukraine that allows people to lock their profile to provide an additional layer of protection for the privacy and security of their information.”

cybersecurity alert

This is timeless but currently relevant advice for journalists, as well as others who may be involved in sharing information about the conflict, from Harvard scholar Shorenstein Jane Lytvynenko: “Make sure your reporters, [editores], photographers, administration staff and anyone else involved in covering this war has strong cybersecurity hygiene. Research the sources. Check the documents. Be aware of the potential for attacks from phishing. Use two-factor authentication everywhere through an app. Vary passwords. Everything”.

The war through the objective of a influencer from instagram

Twenty or thirty years ago, the stories of innocent families suffering in war were largely told through the lenses of professional photographers and reporters. Now they can tell their own stories. Kaya Yurieff of The Information wrote on influencer, from Instagram, and streamers, on Twitch in Ukraine that “showed how quickly life in the country went from normal to nightmare.” Tanya Parfileva, who has 1.7 million followers on Instagram, “shared a selfie in an elevator in a fluffy beige coat and a photo of tea and chocolate” a day ago, but now Parfileva is sharing the reality of the war in Kyiv , such as his travel bag filled with “documents such as passports, a first aid kit, cash, clothes, a lighter and a knife.” For now, according to Parfileva’s messages, she is staying in Kyiv.

How will this change the nature of the conflict?

Returning to Johnson’s column for slatenoted that “the scale and impact of what is happening and what we are seeing cannot be underestimated.”

“We are seeing how a massive conflict – the scale of which has not been seen on the continent [europeo] in almost 100 years – shakes the second largest country in Europe. From our offices, our porches, our cars, and our schools, we can watch the battles as they happen,” he wrote. “What can this mean? It’s too early to tell. But it means a historic shift in the way we fight, and in the way the world views those fights.”