Volunteers and emergency workers from Ukraine carry a pregnant lady who was injured in a hospital for women with severe injuries. Russian bombings of the hospital in which she was supposed to have given birth killed both her and her baby.
ASSOCIATED PROPRESS
Russian authorities have woven a web of false information across social media about their forces’ attack on a Ukrainian hospital last week even after earlier attempts by the platforms to halt this disinformation campaign.
The disinformation was distributed by Russian embassies on Telegram, Facebook and Twitter. The incident has drawn rebukes from the White House and other Western leaders, while Ukrainian President Zelensky called it an “atrocity.” A photo of a pregnant woman carried away from the rubble on a stretcher has been shared widely on social media—it appears above—and has quickly becoming one of the most dramatic images from the Russian invasion into Ukraine. Both she and her child died later.
A series of tweets by the Russian embassy in Britain over the last week claimed that the hospital was empty. They then followed this up with false claims that photos were being staged. Twitter removed the tweets. But over the past week, the same type of disinformation about the hospital has been put out through Russia’s embassies in Japan, Denmark, Greece and 16 other nations, reaching an audience of more than 2.4 million on Twitter alone, according to research by FakeReporter, an Israeli watchdog group monitoring disinformation.
This latest example of fake content from Russia about the war underscores the country’s continued ability to weaponize social media, and, in what amounts to a high-stakes game of Whac-a-Mole, the inability of these platforms to do much about it. disinformation either distributed by Russia or pro-Russian actors have spread across nearly every major social network in the last two weeks, a river of false content about Nazis in Ukraine’s government, military biolabs under Ukraine control, even that billionaire George Soros is secretly funding Ukraine’s resistance against Russia.
One Russian tank is seen moving through the streets of Mariupol in Ukraine on Friday March 11th, 2022.ASSOCIATED PROPRESS
The Mariupol hospital disinformation puts this into stark relief—with Twitter banning the content in one place as it flourishes elsewhere. “If content posted by the Russian embassy in the UK is a lie, it’s a lie everywhere else,” says Achiya Schatz, FakeReporter’s executive director. “Those Russian channels are now embassies of war. They spread disinformation to confuse the masses, hide victims and help the Kremlin continue and normalize the invasion.” (Twitter, Facebook and Telegram couldn’t be immediately reached for comment.)
A tweet from the Russian Embassy in Denmark was published by Twitter a minute-long videoInaccurately claimed photos from the hospital only showed broken furniture, videos, and not people. It showed the image of the woman on a stretcher, pasting a large, red “FAKE” label over it, an attempt to mimic what genuine researchers have tried to do to distinguish between real and inauthentic pictures from the war. You can also see the debunked claim that the Ukrainian Instagram model took photos.
This video, or an edited version thereof was shared to Russian Embassy Twitter accounts. Peru, Argentina Cambodia. Russian embassies Panama, SwedenMongolia and Mongolia have also posted photos and text. Japan’s Russian embassy sent out information via Twitter in English, Japanese and Russian.
Russia uses Facebook as well. The company posted similar photos, videos and text to its pages on embassy pages in Japan. Costa Rica. Denmark. Tunisia. Greece. It had deleted the material posted to these three countries on Thursday afternoon, but it was still available in Japan and Costa Rica.
And on Telegram, the message was spread by Russian embassies in Spain, Cambodia and Ireland, as well as the Telegram channel controlled by Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In the channel run by the ministry, authorities put up a version of the video and said Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and unnamed “independent investigative outlets” had concluded reports about the hospital bombing were a “hoax.” It further criticized Twitter for taking down the tweets by Russia’s U.K. embassy.
The post in the ministry’s Telegram channel ends by imploring readers with a hashtag: #Think4Yourself.
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