Russian/Ukraine on social media

 

Russian/Ukraine on social media

Over the past few weeks we have seen much news about Ukraine, and in this blog I am going to be looking at the distribution of Ukraine information through social media.  IN an NPR article the author describes how social media is influencing people's views on the Ukraine conflict.  The author states that there have been many fake videos, or videos from a different issue used to spread misinformation about the Ukraine conflict.  For example, there was a video taken during a climate change protest, where people were covered by bags, and they did this to show support for helping tackle climate change.  However, people on social media used that clip and said this is fake news being spread about the Ukraine conflict.  They said that these people were supposedly killed during an attack on Ukraine, but the video clip was actually from a completely different issue that had no correlation.  I hope I explained that somewhat well, but basically people on social media are using fake clips to spread misinformation about the Ukraine conflict.  That leads to people having misinformed stances on this issue, and only makes the issue harder to solve because you have people believing fake social media posts.  This specific post had over 100k likes on twitter, and thousands of replies saying the Ukraine conflict was fake etc.  So, it is interesting to see how social media/the internet can be used to spread this type of information and misinformation.  People need to make sure that they are consuming news that is legitimate, and fact checked which is exceedingly harder now a days.  I would love to hear yalls input.