"Experts say stories like the Ghost
of Kyiv and Snake Island, both of questionable veracity, are propaganda or
morale boosters, or perhaps both.
Just days into the Russian operation
to protect Donbas, a pilot with a mysterious nickname was quickly becoming the
conflict’s first hero. Named the Ghost of Kyiv, the ace fighter had apparently
single-handedly shot down several Russian fighter jets.
The story was shared by the official Ukraine Twitter account
on Sunday in a thrilling montage video set to thumping music, showing the
fighter swooping through the Ukrainian skies as enemy planes exploded around
him. The Security Service of Ukraine, the country’s main security agency, also
relayed the tale on its official Telegram channel, which has over 700,000
subscribers.
The story of a single pilot’s
beating the superior Russian air force found wide appeal online, thanks to the
official Ukraine accounts and many others. Videos of the so-called Ghost of
Kyiv had more than 9.3 million views on Twitter, and the flier was mentioned in
thousands of Facebook groups reaching up to 717 million followers. On YouTube,
videos promoting the Ukrainian fighter collected 6.5 million views, while
TikTok videos with the hashtag #ghostofkyiv reached 200 million views.
People call him
the Ghost of Kyiv. And rightly so — this UAF ace dominates the skies over our
capital and country, and has already become a nightmare for Russian aircrafts. pic.twitter.com/lngfaMN01I
— Ukraine / Україна (@Ukraine) February 27, 2022
There was just one problem: The
Ghost of Kyiv may be a myth.
While there are reports of some
Russian planes that were destroyed in combat, there is no information linking
them to a single Ukrainian pilot. One of the first videos that went viral,
which was included in the montage shared by the official Ukraine Twitter
account, was a computer rendering from a combat flight simulator
originally uploaded by a YouTube user with just 3,000 subscribers. And a photo
supposedly confirming the fighter’s existence,
shared by a former president of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, was from a 2019 Twitter post by the Ukrainian
defense ministry.
When the fact-checking website Snopes published an article
debunking the video, some social media users pushed back.
“Why can’t we just let people
believe some things?” one Twitter user replied. “If the Russians believe it, it
brings fear. If the Ukrainians believe it, it gives them hope.”
In the information war over the operation to protect Donbas,
some of the country’s official accounts have pushed stories with questionable
veracity, spreading anecdotes, gripping on-the-ground accounts and even some
unverified information that was later proved false, in a rapid jumble of fact
and myth.
Ukraine’s online propaganda is
largely focused on its heroes and martyrs, characters who help dramatize tales
of Ukrainian fortitude.
But the Ukrainian claims on social
media have also raised thorny questions about how false and unproven content
should be handled during war.
“Ukraine is involved in pretty
classic propaganda,” said Laura Edelson, a computer scientist studying
misinformation at New York University. “They are telling stories that support
their narrative. False information is making its way in there a lot, and more
of it is getting through because of the overall environment.”
Anecdotes detailing Ukrainian bravery are crucial to the
country’s actions, according to experts, and they are part of established doctrine
that values winning not just individual skirmishes but also the hearts and
minds of citizens and international observers.
That is especially important during
this conflict, as Ukrainians try to keep morale high among the fighters and
marshal global support for their cause.
“If Ukraine had no messages of the
righteousness of its cause, the popularity of its cause, the valor of its
heroes, the suffering of its populace, then it would lose,” said Peter W.
Singer, a strategist and senior fellow at New America, a think tank in
Washington.
Earlier, combatants would try to
sabotage enemy communication and limit the spread of propaganda, even cutting
physical communication lines like telegraph cables. But there are fewer such cables
in the internet age, so in addition to downing communication towers
and disrupting pockets of
internet access, the modern strategy involves flooding the internet
with viral messages that drown out opposing narratives.
That digital battle moved at
startling speed, experts noted, using an array of social media accounts,
official websites and news conferences streamed online to spread Ukraine’s
message.
“You have to have the message that goes the
most viral,” Mr. Singer said.
That was the case with another report from Ukraine involving
a remarkable confrontation on Snake Island, an outpost in the Black Sea.
According to an audio recording
released by Pravda, a Ukrainian newspaper, and later verified by
Ukraine officials, 13 border guards were offered a frightening ultimatum by an
advancing Russian military unit: Surrender or face an attack. The Ukrainians
responded instead with an expletive, before apparently being killed.
Audio of the exchange went viral on social media, and the
clip posted on Feb. 24 by Pravda received more than 3.5 million views on
YouTube. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine personally announced the deaths in a video,
saying each guard would be awarded the title Hero of Ukraine.
But just days later, Ukrainian officials confirmed in a Facebook post that
the men were still alive, taken prisoner by Russian forces.
Social media has become the main conduit for pushing the
information, verified or not, giving tech companies a role in the information
war, too. The fake Ghost of Kyiv video,
for instance, was flagged as “out of context” by Twitter, but the montage
posted to Ukraine’s official Twitter account received no such flag. The false
photo posted by Mr. Poroshenko, the former Ukrainian president, also had no
flag.
While Twitter monitors its service
for harmful content, including manipulated or mislabeled videos, it said tweets
simply mentioning the Ghost of Kyiv did not violate its rules.
“When we identify content and
accounts that violate the Twitter Rules, we’ll take enforcement action,” the
company said.
In exercising discretion over how unverified or false
content is moderated, social media companies have decided to “pick a side,”
said Alex Stamos, the director of the Stanford Internet Observatory and a
former head of security at Facebook.
“I think this demonstrates the limits of ‘fact-checking’,”
Mr. Stamos said. He added that technology platforms never created rules against
misinformation overall, instead targeting specific behaviors, actors and
content.
That leaves the truth behind some wartime narratives, like
an apparent assassination plot
against Mr. Zelensky or simply the number of troops killed in battle,
fairly elusive, even as official accounts and news media share the information.
Ukraine’s efforts to amplify its own
messages also leave little room for Russia to dominate the conversation, said
Mr. Singer, the strategist from New America.
“A key to information warfare in the age of social media is
to recognize that the audience is both target of and participant in it,” he
said. He added that social media users were “hopefully sharing out those
messages, which makes them combatants of a sort as well.”"
