Fake news outbreak on Twitter amid Russia's invasion of Ukraine, can the viral spread be stopped?

Chandigarh, March 1

It has been over a week that Russia attacked Ukraine. Amid this, Twitter is full of fake news. There is no denying that we all depend on information from YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, but how do we tackle with disinformation related to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the fake news related to it.

“I’ve seen more fake news in one weeks that in all my whole life!!!”.

The social media is flooded with false and fake stories at a time of the war that has baffled the users. Most are too naïve to believe that they were true while others going for a fact check.

Meta has taken down a network for targeting people in Ukraine who posed as news editors, aviation engineers and authors to spread misinformation around the Russian invasion across social media platforms.

The people ran websites posing as independent news entities and created fake personas across social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Telegram and also Russian Odnoklassniki and VK apps, the company said late on Sunday.

“In the last 48 hours, we uncovered a relatively small network of about 40 accounts, Pages and Groups on Facebook and Instagram. They were operated from Russia and Ukraine and targeted people in Ukraine across multiple social media platforms and through their own websites,” said Nathaniel Gleicher, Head of Security Policy at Meta.

Meta took down this operation, blocked their domains from being shared on its platform, and shared information with other tech platforms, researchers and governments.

Below are a few stories, which went viral but were fake.

Fact check- photo shoot from 2015!!! That’s exactly what media shows and the masses believe 🤡 #FakeNews #Misinformation #RussiaUkraineWar #FoxNewsLies #FoxNews pic.twitter.com/gb6UTCUMgg

— rishika rheea (@rishikarheea) February 28, 2022