it's important that we as journalists help you the viewer to understand how to navigate misinformation and harmful myths that surface in the fog of war whether it's videos that pop up on social media or watching a newscast false claims spread and can stoke economic anxiety terrorism fears racism even religious bias that's where the technology and social change team at harvard's sharing center and groups like the investigative team at propublica come into play right now they are scouring the internet and compiling all kinds of essential information to help you dissect detect and document and debunk misinformation
when it comes the unfolding conflict in ukraine joining us now dr joan donovan research director there at the shorenstein center and craig silverman a national reporter for pro publica and former media editor of buzzfeed news where he pioneered coverage of digital disinformation we are so glad to have you both with us today good to see you both thank you so much joan let's go ahead and let's start with you and let's start with tick-tock just something as simple as the hashtag ukraine it already has more than 30 billion views people scrolling from here ukraine even
russia so i just want to take a look at this one image that your team highlighted from early on in the war allegedly showing troops in combat um but you knew it was fake as we look at these various uh images how did you know so when we were looking for um any kind of fakes or forgeries what we're really looking for is recontextualized media and so a lot of times it's just stuff that's been found on the internet that's been repackaged as something else and so one of the techniques that we use is this
kind of digital forensics that anybody can do which includes reverse image search to see if that image has been available before or using some video analysis software but ultimately a lot of this comes down to the weather uh weirdly enough but a lot of the early uh recontextualized footage that wasn't of ukraine but looked like it could be from a war uh was either springtime or it was snowing and the weather just didn't match up with what was actually happening in kiev or we have one of those images you know what hold that thought let's
see if we can bring up that image it's actually a still shot of troops and um you can it's a close-up of troops and you can see grass in the picture um so while we're looking to find that image which we did cut let's see if we can do that explain that one picture because how did you know that those weren't actually ukrainian troops firing upon russians do you think we can find the image guys if they don't okay they're looking for it what it looks like this is what helps shooting right exactly is you
have to be attuned to what's happening in the moment and uh and so there's a lot of greenery in the picture and we know that right now it's it's not uh you know springtime uh in ukraine and so that gave it away and then there was another part of the image where ukrainian soldiers are starting to had started to wear these bright yellow armbands uh to denote that they were you know ukrainian soldiers and uh and so those kinds of missing or contextual factors are really important when you're trying to look at uh if something
is a forgery or a fake or just uh repurposed all right i apologize we can't seem to get those things in order but i'll definitely direct people to your website where they can see those specifics so craig you investigated and gathered all kinds of videos on social media we're going to hopefully roll through a number of screenshots that you put together for us uh yes this is right what did you discover that was just blatantly false as you came across these images online well this is kind of a devious technique where what we came across
were a bunch of videos that on their face seemed to actually be fact checking videos where they were russian language videos pointing out something that was you know incorrect as as dr donovan said you know recontextualized media so an old image of a destroyed military vehicle that had a ukrainian flag put on it and the debunking was saying look here are ukrainians creating fakes um you know showing that they've destroyed a russian vehicle or putting a you know a logo on one that didn't have it before and what was crazy about this is we realized
that the fakes themselves had never never actually circulated and so at the end of the day what we were able to confirm was that these were fake fact-checking videos where they created ukrainian disinformation to try and undermine for russian speakers any claims about you know russian military setbacks any claims about strikes on civilian areas so it was just it was fact checking as disinformation which is kind of a couple layers of disturbingness yeah no doubt and it looks real you know and as soon as you see fact check to the average person they're probably thinking
oh okay this is what i can believe um joan your team also put together this great list of six things to know when it came to the history and politics of these nations to help viewers understand why this conflict is even happening um briefly run through the first three and i've got it right here in front of me in case uh in this case we need to go into any specifics but just the three points here starting with the conflict between russia and ukraine it didn't start in 2022 which a lot of people who don't
know the history of the two nations uh didn't realize that yeah and if you think back you know it's not that long ago but in 2014 after the sochi olympics you saw russia invade crimea and eventually crimea was annexed and then we saw uh slowly over time russia had had encroached upon other areas of ukraine which points to the other two uh issues here one is russia's tactic of spreading disinformation using russian state media as channels of propaganda to support the kremlin and in that russian state media seeks to undermine the history of ukraine by
suggesting uh the third point which is this claim that russia created ukraine uh and that ukraine is not an independent uh country in any way but of course uh ukraine actually pre-dates uh russia and moscow uh and is uh a country full of a very vibrant culture of people that are proud to be ukrainian and and have a unique language and and uh sort of uh you know culture that they enjoy and so those three points together the re uh the redeployment of the historical narrative of russia's this this uh all-encompassing territory that basically birthed
ukraine uh that's what's at stake here and of course the very recent history of battle that ukrainians uh feel that russia has been invading them for years now and we're only starting to pay attention on the west because it's in it's in fact it's affecting inflation and all of these other uh important global geopolitical issues right everybody's filling it in the pocketbook but also we're seeing it um visually like we've never seen it before um and and craig and joan we've all talked about this how this is probably going to go down as the most
documented war in history because of social media right and everybody has a device and and is on some sort of platform and craig you investigated and exposed actual russian paid trolls that are out there putting out all this pro-putin disinformation tell us more yeah we worked with researchers from clemson and people will remember that back in around the 2016 election there was a russian organization called the internet research agency which has links to the russian government where they were professional patrols working in shifts basically pretending to be americans and all over social media you know
publishing divisive content what we found with the researchers were sets of russian language accounts across twitter tik tok and instagram that have hallmarks of those same internet research agency uh types of accounts um they were spreading pro-putin pro-russian propaganda they were taking old videos sharing them as new pretending that they were ukrainians faking civilian deaths and so we saw actually they were extremely effective on tick tock uh generating millions and millions of views millions and millions of likes pushing out russian um state content uh and so they are appear to be active in this conflict
and tick tock and twitter remove many of the counts but we've seen them sort of come back on these platforms since wow and joan let's hit the last uh final three tips about things that we should know uh when we read about the war in ukraine starting with the issue of nato right that's been a big part of of this content or this tension with putin but actually ukraine is a partner not a member of nato but is a partner and not a not a lot of people understand that yeah and that's where the debate
about where the planes and air defense might come from uh us and other countries have been setting sending uh you know missiles javelins uh in order to do anti-aircraft um warfare and ukrainians then have to to use these uh these weapons but if they were a partner uh i mean if they were a member of nato then they would be protected by this uh you know clause that says an attack against one as an attack against all and this really goes to a few key things about why we're in this predicament in the u.s where
uh in 1994 uh there was an agreement where uh ukraine decided to give up their nuclear weapons so long as uh there would be a guarantee of security from russia and the unite in the united states and the united kingdom were supposed to protect that so in line with and not being a partner in nato they also have denuclearized ukraine and that has been putting them at a different kind of risk because they obviously cannot threaten this kind of full-scale nuclear assault that many in in the west and biden uh and and others in the
white house have been uh really uh trying to figure out if this is even you know going to to scale to that level and then lastly it's really important that we understand is that uh putin has been in power for a very long time in russia and zielinski uh is the president of ukraine has only been there since 2019 and if you don't remember back during the first impeachment of trump zielinski was the person that trump had had that very perfect best phone call um with in terms of trying to get yes exactly the quid
pro quo argument and this was in fact about money for ukrainian defense and ukrainian defense goes mainly into trying to ward off russia incursion and so this is a really important political issue that we have to pay attention to but also that the united states has made some promises here in terms of protecting ukraine going back to 1994 and the denuclearization arguments that uh we have to be mindful of and and respectful of and you know i think it ultimately points to this vision of the future of democracy and where where modern nations want to
go in terms of leadership and the relationship between countries you know i'm kind of throwing this out there and and craig tell me if you can answer this and and i'm sure joan you could weigh in but you know you bring up that that infamous moment of the quid pro quo that phone call that happened between trump and zielinski and he was trying to get scoop uh during the election he was trying to get uh dirt right on uh for the campaign on his his competitor at that time and allegedly said i'm gonna take away
support uh for all your weapons until you give me uh dirt on my my political opponent and and then of course it was all over the news i even traveled to the to the region at that time there has been talk out there about the fact that is that what contributed to this is that why zielinski is is is having a harder time staving off the russians because trump you know took away the aid and the help uh to to ukraine i know we're kind of going a little bit into the weeds but it is
a little background the story has come up the conversation has taken place um is this uh an example of of misinformation craig you know i i think in that scenario one of the concerns of the kind of you know the consequences from it is that obviously it it frayed some of the relations at that time between ukraine and the united states and while biden has sort of stepped in and said that he is you know stalwartly behind ukraine it did delay some of their ability to you know get some funding and get some weapons and
perhaps that fit into uh putin's plans about eventually trying to uh invade and take over and and take more territory from ukraine so it is amazing to see how something that happened that had sort of faded i think from consciousness for a lot of people in the united states especially given that biden was elected that it comes back and you you remember that that was a really key moment and it had implications for trump's presidency but also we see it today there is a war in ukraine which was you know the subject of that dispute
at that time during the election craig silverman with propublica and also uh joan donovan research director at the shorenstein center there at harvard what a great conversation you guys do such great work thank you so much you keep you you hold us all accountable for just getting the truth out there and getting things right i appreciate you both so much appreciate you thank you so much hi everyone george stephanopoulos here thanks for checking out the abc news youtube channel if you'd like to get more videos show highlights and watch live event coverage click on the
right over here to subscribe to our channel and don't forget to download the abc news app for breaking news alerts thanks for watching
