Telegram
is the Digital
Battlefield of the
RUSSO-UKRAINIAN
WAR
Three weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022, a video appeared on a Ukrainian news site that seemed to show President Volodymyr Zelensky imploring his fellow countrymen to stop fighting and urging soldiers to lay down their weapons.
airport drags his suitcase wearing sunglasses @StableDiffusion
The video — a crude DEEPFAKE that had been posted by hackers — was quickly taken down and debunked. It was dismissed by the real Zelensky as a childish provocation, and roundly mocked online as an example of Russia’s desperate and often cartoonish attempts to spread fake news. But researchers say the deepfake is just one example of a barrage of disinformation, manipulated imagery, forged documents, and targeted propaganda unleashed by Russia and pro-Kremlin activists that may have had a significant impact on audiences over the last year of war.
Changing people’s minds and positions is much harder than simply sowing doubt or fear
,says Andy Carvin, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, which has tracked Russian hybrid warfare activities since 2015.
It’s one of the reasons why Kremlin information operations focus so much on essentially generating chaos, causing contagion, causing a loss of morale, or just getting people simply confused about what’s true and what’s not.
Over the past year, the Kremlin and its allies used a dizzying array of strategies to defend its actions, seed doubt about news from the ground, and push misleading or false narratives to undercut support for Ukraine. The Kremlin targeted everyone from Ukrainian citizens to right-wing groups in the U.S. and Europe, countries taking in Ukrainian refugees and those supplying crucial aid, and potentially sympathetic audiences in Africa and Latin America, as well as domestic audiences in Russia itself.
It very hard (to know what to believe), especially when you hear the bombs outside of your window
,says Ksenia Iliuk, the co-founder of LetsData, a non-profit that uses artificial intelligence to analyze hostile information operations. In the first month of the invasion, her team identified about 35 new, unique pieces of Russian propaganda or disinformation narratives per day.
Ukrainian officials treated the digital space as a front line in the war from the start, setting up teams and processes to verify the facts in all updates posted on official channels as a way to pre-empt any challenges to their credibility.
Social media is Ukrainians’ primary news source — surpassing television in 2020, according to a recent survey—and the Russians targeted popular apps with false narratives meant to demoralize the population, create panic, and undermine trust in Zelensky. Much of the information battle was fought on TELEGRAM, a messaging app that surged in popularity due to its largely unmoderated platform which allowed raw footage of the war to be widely disseminated.
The structure of the app made it easy to build massive propaganda channels that spread fake photos and videos to millions of followers.
As part of an effort to target Telegram, Russia co-opted popular fact-checking formats. It created a host of multilingual channels, like one named “War on Fakes,” which “verified” or “fact-checked” allegations to support pro-Kremlin narratives and defend the Russian military’s actions. The original Russian-language channel amassed more than 750,000 followers on Telegram, and its website translated its content into Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, and Spanish, which was then amplified by Russian embassies and other government channels.
It’s difficult to imagine how Russia’s war in Ukraine would be playing out without Telegram. The messaging app, which last year reached a billion downloads, has turned into the conflict’s digital battle space. It’s an instrumental tool for both governments and a hub of information for citizens on both sides. Ukrainian government officials, including President Volodymyr Zelensky, rely on the app for everything from rallying global support to disseminating air raid warnings and maps of local bomb shelters. So do both the Russian government and Russian opposition channels, who now find themselves cut off from most mainstream social media. Amateur sleuths and senior military officials alike comb Ukrainian channels 24/7 for fresh details about the latest strikes or military developments.
Wars have unfolded on social media before, but rarely have they been so meticulously documented as in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And Telegram has emerged as its most important social-media platform, offering the world an unfiltered view of the war.
The app has been essential in the exodus of more than three million Ukrainian refugees, connecting them to safe routes and aid. Millions of Ukrainians outside the country use it to find news from home, desperately scanning endless feeds of photos and videos for familiar landmarks or faces. So do family members of Russian soldiers.
It’s the last social media bridge from the Western world into the Russian world...where you can kind of see what’s going and how the battle is playing out
,says Clint Watts, a former FBI agent and fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute who focuses on foreign disinformation. She states:
Whoever can sustain their information campaigns on Telegram has the best chance of shaping world views around what’s going on inside Ukraine.
The powerand peril of TELEGRAM is the product of its lack of oversight. Founded in 2013 by now-exiled Russian brothers Nikolai and Pavel Durov, the messaging app soon became notorious as a haven for extremists like the Islamic State. As social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube cracked down on content from jihadist and extremist groups, the then–obscure messaging service offered them speed, security, and privacy–with little to no moderation. Telegram has been used by fringe groups like Covid-19 and QAnon conspiracy theorists and white nationalists, but also Black Lives Matter organizers, pro–democracy groups from South Korea to Cuba and Iran, and Russia’s own opposition groups.
There is no algorithm that decides what to show users or what to restrict, and its architecture allows limitless groups.
Comments are easily turned off, turning channels into a megaphone blasting information to a captive audience of millions of followers. With just one click, a built–in button can translate messages from Russian to English or other languages, turning it into a tool of mass communication.
This has turned Telegram into the heart of the PROPAGANDA BATTLE, allowing tales of Ukrainian resistance or heroism to go viral side-by-side with Russian disinformation.
Now, amid increasingly brutal attacks on Ukrainian civilians and a desperate crackdown on “false information” in Russia, both sides are racing to dominate the Telegram war.
Telegram has become this really key battleground in the information war
,says Dr. Ian Garner, a historian and translator of Russian war propaganda.
And it’s interesting that this information war has been outsourced to a private company.
The Ukrainian government repurposed its official COVID-19 Telegram channel, which for the previous two years had been used to share pandemic-related news, to provide 24/7 updates about the war. Renamed “UkraineNow,” the effort now has more than three million followers across its Ukrainian, Russian and English-language channels.
The Ukrainians have also used Telegram to try to outpace the Russian propaganda machine by warning people about false narratives – that Ukrainian forces were surrendering, or that Zelensky had fled Kyiv – before they take root. Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation, which is part of its national security and defense council, has been calling on ordinary citizens to join the information front!
Source:[12] Source:[13]