The Role of Social Media and the Internet During Russia’s War in Ukraine
By Kiran Yeh, Global High School Fellow (Brooklyn Technical High School ‘24)
The Role of Social Media and the Internet During Russia’s War in Ukraine
Before the war in Ukraine broke out in February 2022, 16-year-old Maikl seldom followed the news. “Most of my friends don’t read the news,” he said, shaking his head. “But since the beginning of the war, I have been monitoring the news every day to know what is happening.”
There are two wars in Ukraine right now: one over territory and one over information. Maikl, who is Ukrainian, needs to stay alert about the state of his country. He goes out of his way to find trustworthy sources through newspapers, the internet, and social media.
Traditionally, newspapers have been the most important and popular sources of information. But during the past year, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine has worsened the already struggling free press in Ukraine, making it increasingly difficult to get access to independent journalism. According to the World Press Freedom Index created by Reporters Without Borders, the country ranks 106th out of 140 countries in free press. As of February 2023, at least 12 journalists have been killed, 26 journalists have been knowingly targeted, 19 journalists have been injured, and 217 media platforms have closed in Ukraine. Russia ranks even lower on the index at 155th. The New Yorker recently described Putin’s crackdown on reporters as “criminalizing journalism” in Russia.
Still, Maikl regularly reads Censor.net, Ukrainska Pravda, and The New Voice of Ukraine to receive his daily news. He also “subscribes’’ to The New York Times through Instagram, where he learned that the Russian mercenary Wagner Group was recruiting murderers and criminals in exchange for freedom. But these handful of news outlets are not always enough.
Now, during the digital age, it has become increasingly evident that social media and the Internet serve as equally vital sources of information. Social media and Internet sites provide a rapid abundance of information that is necessary during times of panic. They reach a vast audience outside of Ukraine and Russia, informing individuals in other nations about the war. Ukraine has garnered abundant support from foreign countries through social media platforms.
However, online media also makes it easier to spread disinformation and propaganda. According to The Conversation, some of the rumors that surfaced on social media platforms include that the Ukrainian government was undertaking a mass genocide of civilians, that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy was an agent of the “New World Order,” and that the United States had funded bioweapons research in Ukraine. Although these allegations have been discredited, they still reached millions of people and offered a weak justification for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The war in Ukraine is described as the world’s first “TikTok war,” the most “internet-accessible war in history,” and history’s “most viral” by War on the Rocks, a testament to the integral part that digital technology plays in spreading news during this war. With the help of Maikl, I explored the positive and negative effects these platforms have on Ukrainians, Russians, and citizens worldwide.
The Duality of Telegram
The most used social platform used during the war among Ukrainians is Telegram. Telegram is a messaging app similar to Discord and WhatsApp founded by Russian entrepreneur Pavel Durov. During the war, it has served as the most important platform for live updates.
Telegram has groups and channels where organizations can reach hundreds of thousands of people with messages and live streams. Even Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president, regularly updates his nearly one million followers on the network with messages about Ukrainian efforts to win the war against Russian forces.
In an interview with NPR, a man from Ukraine named Artem Kliuchnikov said, “Even before [something] hits the news, you see the videos on the Telegram channels. Telegram has become my primary news source.” Maikl said that he also frequently uses Telegram to get information rapidly.
Throughout the war, Ukrainians and as well as Russians both turned to the app for news following the Kremlin’s (the Russian government) suppression of independent media. According to Time, there was a 48% increase in the number of Russian subscribers on Telegram since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Several independent journalists and news outlets joined Telegram to disseminate news freely. Western outlets including The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post joined Telegram at the beginning of the war. The Washington Post relaunched its Telegram channel in late March 2022 specifically “to focus on the latest from the war in Ukraine,” according to a Twitter post by the Post’s senior global audience editor, Sofia Diogo Mateus.
Not only does Telegram continue to send out news updates, but it has helped the government battle the war of disinformation. At the beginning of the war in March 2022, unidentified hackers took control of the website of the local government in the western province of Volyn, according to NBC. They put up a fake notice that government officials there had agreed to surrender– a tactic meant to confuse Ukrainian civilians. However, the Security Service of Ukraine quickly alerted its approximate 800,000 followers on Telegram that the claim was false, and that Volyn was still safely in Ukrainian hands. The crisis was adverted because of Telegram.
Nevertheless, Telegram has had its downsides as well. For one, privacy experts have worried that the platform is not secure enough–group chats and the channel features are not fully encrypted (unlike Whatsapp). Only one-to-one chats are end-to-end encrypted, but not by default. The company could access all of the unencrypted messages and turn them over to the Russian government–and it seems like they might have.
Over the past year, hundreds of Telegram users have had their activity used against them in criminal cases. It seems to be that even their “secret chats,” the feature that is supposed to be encrypted, is behaving in ways that suggest that a third party might be monitoring the conversation. Although it is not certain, it is possible that the “supposedly antiauthoritarian app…[is] now complying with the Kremlin’s legal requests,” according to WIRED.
Additionally, American social media apps, such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, actively identify and remove government-run propaganda campaigns, while Telegram has been known to have a more permissive attitude toward content moderation. Despite the European Union’s ban on Russian media channels Sputnik and Russia Today on Telegram, Europeans are still exposed to disinformation circulating through other users on the platform. A few days after Russia invaded Ukraine, Durov wrote that Telegram was “increasingly becoming a source of unverified information.” He suggested restricting the use of Telegram in Ukraine and Russia, but after receiving fierce opposition from users, he soon retired the idea.
In October, AP News wrote an article revealing that Russia had been spreading war propaganda videos by using digital tricks “to evade restrictions imposed by governments and tech companies.” The videos, which were uploaded to Telegram and then spread to Twitter, “blame Ukraine for civilian casualties as well as claims that residents of areas forcibly annexed by Russia have welcomed their occupiers.” This is just one of the many ways that fake news is still able to spread across Telegram.
Although Maikl is highly aware that disinformation is spread on Telegram in Ukraine, he believes that the majority of Ukrainians do not buy into it and know how to spot it easily. “At the beginning of the war, there was much more [disinformation],” he claimed. “But now, it has stabilized. Disinformation is usually hyped up. You can analyze it yourself.”
The Information War on Twitter and Facebook
American platforms Twitter and Facebook, like Telegram, also have an influx of disinformation. However, as mentioned previously, these platforms do work to remove propaganda campaigns and pro-Russian rhetoric. Both Twitter and Meta work to label posts from Russian state-controlled media and diplomats. They’ve also suppressed some content so it no longer turns up in searches or automatic recommendations.
In the past year, although big platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have limited the reach of Russia’s official channels, there’s been an “uptick in covert activity linked to Russia,” according to Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram.
Recently, Meta took down two large networks that were active throughout the summer and that tried to shape public opinion of the war. The networks used more than 3,000 fake accounts, pages, and groups to overwhelm the platform with false information. The operation also involved dozens of websites created to imitate legitimate news sites; instead of the actual news reported by those outlets, the sites contained links to disinformation about Ukraine. Although Meta said it disabled the operation before it was able to gain a large audience, it was still “the largest and most complex Russian propaganda effort that it has found since the invasion began,” according to NPR.
Disinformation regarding the war is still fervent on Twitter. Last May, Twitter limited over 300 Russian government accounts in addition to their policy that no longer automatically recommended posts that made misleading claims about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Even though policies were put into place a year ago, now that Elon Musk wiped out the team that fought these disinformation networks, hundreds of Russian and Chinese state propaganda accounts are thriving on Twitter, according to the BBC. These disinformation networks are known as “troll farms,” or organized groups of people posting coordinated messages, that “support Putin’s war in Ukraine, ridicule Kyiv and the West, and attack independent Russian-language publications, including the BBC Russian Service.”
Still, Twitter has also served a vital role in keeping Ukrainians informed and raising funds for the war effort. President Zelenskyy’s Twitter account is now one of the most reliable ways for many Ukrainians to get “crucial information on the invasion and negotiations between Zelenskyy and other leaders,” according to The Conversation.
Twitter has also a place for humor, and many groups have used this tactic to gain support for Ukrainians during the war. For instance, The North Atlantic Fellas Organization (NAFO), an alliance of Twitter users weaponizing memes and dog photos, uses satire to push back against Russian online disinformation and even raised $400,000 for the Georgian Legion.
Social Media Restrictions in Russia: More Clampdown on Freedom of Speech
Several social media platforms and websites have been banned throughout Russia. Some notable ones include Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Google News, BBC News, NPR, and Ukrayinska Pravda. Additionally, Russian government-affiliated organizations and state agencies are blacklisted from Discord, Microsoft Teams, Skype for Business, Snapchat, Threema, Viber, WhatsApp, and WeChat.
The move to ban all of these social media platforms, among citizens and government officials, can be seen as a wider crackdown against technology services in Russia. The Putin administration seeks to minimize dissent and control the media, and to do so, they must limit foreign narratives. The restrictions specifically being placed on government officials are most likely in place to minimize the chance of sensitive information reaching Ukraine’s allies.
Russia Leads the Information War Outside of West Europe and The United States
Earlier in February 2023, the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence (COE) held a presentation event called “How to lose the information war: a case study of Russia.” COE said their research was largely focused on analyzing Russia’s “unsuccessful attempts to legitimize its aggression towards Ukraine both domestically and internationally.” While this might be true in Western Europe and the United States, it certainly isn’t globally. Russia’s propaganda has reached other countries through social media.
Much of the information reaching Western countries through social media from the Russian government has not been persuasive. “The main idea is to inflate the information space with multiple false theories and denials of what happened to make people disinterested, or just be too puzzled,” said Nathaniel Gleicher, head of security policy at Facebook parent Meta to NPR.
But the Russian government has been working on expanding its influence to Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia through local media and Russian state outlets, and has convinced many of these international users of false claims. According to NPR, “messages often tap into anti-colonial sentiment to encourage distrust of Western governments.”
The wide range of narratives also reflects how the Kremlin spreads certain messages to specific audiences. Russia uses language to ensure that depending on where users are in the world, they will receive different information. This way, they can gain popular support in non-Western countries and gain allies within the war.
Social Media Platforms Endanger Classified Information
More recently, social media platforms have also been the source of leaked classified documents. Not only does social media pose a threat by spreading disinformation, but by also spreading information that is not meant to be seen at all.
Earlier this April, Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, was accused of leaking U.S. classified documents that detailed Ukraine battlefield assessments to covert surveillance of American allies. The documents were first shared on a private invite-only chat on Discord, a messaging app. The members of the chat, called Thug Shaker Central, frequently talked about their love of guns and war-themed video games. The documents moved to Twitter and Telegram and reportedly contained charts and details about weapons deliveries, battalion strengths, and other sensitive information, according to The New York Times.
Social media platforms have made it easier for top-secret information to spread to the public, which has been potentially detrimental to Ukrainian and U.S. efforts during the war.
Valuable but Dangerous
The role of social media and the internet during the war in Ukraine has had both positive and negative implications. With traditional news outlets facing challenges in Ukraine, social media and internet platforms have become crucial sources of information for many Ukrainians like Maikl.
Overall, while social media and the internet have provided valuable sources of information and facilitated global awareness and support for Ukraine, they have also been susceptible to the spread of disinformation and the leakage of classified information. The duality of these platforms highlights the complex role they play in shaping narratives and influencing public opinion during times of conflict.
