As the war in Ukraine approaches the three-year anniversary of the Russian invasion that launched the conflict, NewsGuard has now identified and debunked 302 false claims relating to the war, nearly all of them originating as Russian propaganda.?
Both the content and tactics behind the Russian efforts have evolved since the Feb. 24, 2022, invasion, in both subtle and stark ways.
Among NewsGuard’s findings:
- As the war has gone on, Russian disinformation operatives have increasingly turned to AI, which has served as a force multiplier for Russian propagandists, both in the scale and persuasiveness of their campaigns. Leading Russian propagandist John Mark Dougan has acknowledged to NewsGuard that he uses AI as a force multiplier.
- In the early months of the war, Russian propaganda often focused on alleged claims about the prevalence of Nazism in Ukraine, along with denials that Russia targeted civilian targets. More recently, Russia has pushed baseless false claims about Ukrainian corruption, Zelensky’s supposedly declining domestic political support, and wasteful spending of Western dollars, with many of these accusations created and spread by Dougan.
- Russia’s propaganda efforts are often funded, unknowingly, by major American and global brands whose advertisements are fed onto Russian disinformation sites automatically as part of the programmatic advertising ecosystem through which ads will appear on low-quality websites if brands don’t take steps to prevent it.
Read the full report here: https://lnkd.in/e_Mckr-W
