False and misleading claims about the war in Ukraine are being widely shared.

False and misleading posts about the Ukraine conflict continue to go viral on major social media platforms, as Russia’s invasion of the country extends beyond 500 days.

Some of the most widely shared examples can be found on Twitter, posted by subscribers with a blue tick, who pay for their content to be promoted to other users.

  • vlad@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    15·
    1 year ago

    At some point we have to start blaming the people reading this stuff. I’m not saying that social media platforms shouldn’t try to address this problem, but clearly they don’t know how to, and don’t care. That’s why we’re here, after all.

    • Gray@lemmy.caEnglish
      62·
      1 year ago

      In the past I would have agreed with you, but in the age of increasingly sophisticated AI being able to nearly perfectly imitate people’s voices or images, I think we need to start asking more of social media companies. When truth starts looking indistinguishable from fiction we’re going to need to find new ways of parsing which is which. Fact checking will be extremely important.

    • photonic_sorcerer@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      It’s misinformation directed at a certain target group. I bet you that there’s misinformation out there directed at people like you and me that we’ve fallen for.

      • vlad@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Oh surely. But I personally I would consider that a failure on my part. I’m not saying it’s all on users, but I do wish people thought more about what they read.

        • bedrooms@kbin.social
          1·
          1 year ago

          I agree, but governments are poor at educating adults. (Well, they’re poor at educating children, too.) There’s no way the situation will improve by blaming the problem on the users.

  • lem_dart@lemm.eeEnglish
    10·
    1 year ago

    I feel almost helpless against it sometimes.

    It’s a well known issue on plenty of popular sites (Facebook/Twitter/reddit/etc.). I’m sure federated sites like Lemmy, Mastodon, and others are just as susceptible to it as well.

    I’ve commented on posts in the past to try and combat it and occasionally still do. But there’s a real limit to the amount of stress that comes with trying to convince someone that they’ve been lied to and could be misleading others by repeating what they heard. Especially with the whole “fake news” crap that has been surging I’m the last handful of years. Any proper data used to support truth is just dismissed as fake news.