Fake ‘fact-checks’ seek to obscure Russia’s role in war

“Effective tool”

With hundreds of thousands of subscribers on its Telegram channel, ‘War On Fakes’ calls itself ‘objective’ and ‘unbiased’, claiming to fight the ‘information war launched against Russia’. I’m here.

The author’s name has not been disclosed, and it remains unclear who was behind the project, which was launched last year shortly after the invasion, but some of its amplifiers include the Russian ministries and embassies. Kremlin actors included.

“It is an effective tool of state propaganda and disinformation,” Osaturk said.

“The main reason this works is that fact checks usually serve as a ‘authoritative’ source for readers to seek ‘objective information’.”

Similar fact-checking campaigns have appeared on Russian state television, which runs a segment called “AntiFake,” and on a pro-Moscow Telegram channel called “Fake Cemetery.”

They and other pro-Russian agitators have used fact-checking to discredit Western media coverage of multiple incidents during the conflict, including AFP.

Among them were the killings in Bucha, a suburb of Kiev, where hundreds of bodies were found after the withdrawal of Russian troops last March, and the delivery to a maternity hospital in the port city of Mariupol, which was occupied by Moscow after a long siege. Includes bombardment.

States, including Russia, “have a long tradition of using fact-checking types of technology as part of propaganda campaigns,” Martin Innes, director of Cardiff University’s Institute for Security, Crime and Intelligence Innovation, told AFP. rice field.

“These are typically used to try to deny claims made by adversaries or to create doubts about the veracity of their claims, rather than simply spreading disinformation.”