The young Ukrainians battling pro-Russian trolls

What is it like to be a young Ukrainian experiencing war while dealing with chaos and misinformation on social media?

Katrin, 24, woke up in Kiev last Thursday to the sound of an explosion, only to find her social media awash with distressing posts.

“The first thing we had to do was pack up and go to the basement,” she tells me, now safe in her small hometown on the outskirts of Lviv, where she has escaped with her boyfriend, neighbors and their dogs.

“But right after we went down, I started scrolling through Instagram. And it was all in my Instagram stories and my posts.”

I wasn’t just seeing scary, factual posts from friends, but false information, including comments on TikTok from accounts claiming the war was “not real” or a “hoax.”

“After I blocked this account, another one came up with a profile picture of a different girl writing to me in Russian,” says Katrin.

The trolls have been prolific and have been interacting with young women all over Ukraine.

Alina, 18, went into a complete panic after seeing posts in Russian suggesting that her neighborhood in Zaporizhzhya, in southeastern Ukraine, was about to be bombed and destroyed. But the rumors were false.

Alina spoke to me from her bedroom, exhausted after nights of air raids and shelter. She says the rumors spread quickly on the Telegram chat app, spread by people who apparently set out to cause a panic.

“The Russians specifically find our chats and write that something is exploding. Someone writes that there is a sign of a bomb in the area, then others refute the information,” she says.

Another video he saw on Telegram suggested that there had been an explosion at the airport in his hometown. It turned out to be a different explosion, in the nearby city of Mariupol.

Old footage from other conflicts, including the massive explosion in Beirut in 2020, has also been widely shared, including on TikTok, where the clips have amassed millions of views.

Marta is 20 years old and was stuck in the UK, where she was visiting friends when the war broke out. She says that she has seen videos from Syria and Iraq.

“But they published them as ‘Ukraine,'” she says.

She says the videos on TikTok’s For You page, the main gateway to the video-sharing app, have left her terrified and angry, as she worries desperately about her friends and family back home.

The three women have found themselves battling accounts that post comments in support of Russia.

“Some of them started posting videos, they started calling Ukraine ‘liars,'” Marta says.

Some blamed Ukraine for the violence, writing “glory to Russia,” and others falsely suggested the war was somehow staged.

“Every time I decided to take a look at those accounts, they were a profile with zero followers, zero likes, zero followers, with a profile picture of a Russian flag or something,” says Marta.

Many of the TikTok accounts the women shared with me appear to have taken photos from other accounts online. As Marta says, they have little or no following, and they don’t use their real names, nor do they use generic usernames.

One I looked at used the name “Jess” and only had one follower. The only videos on the account are the ones that were first shared just a few days ago, indicating that the account was created very recently.

Nearly every video the account shared featured debunked and false claims: that a woman injured during a Russian attack was an actress, that news coverage is full of images of old conflicts, and even that the war is somehow not over. happening. .

An account Katrin ended up arguing with on TikTok again had few followers: her profile picture appears to be copied from a Korean woman’s Pinterest page.

None of the accounts have responded to my attempts to contact them, so it’s hard to tell who’s running them. Russia has created inauthentic accounts before to push messages and sow division. But it’s also possible that the accounts are run by real people who believe false claims.

Misinformation is a problem that social media companies have been dealing with for some time. Now his policies are under new scrutiny.

Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, along with Twitter and Google, have announced commitments to tackle misinformation and propaganda about the war in Ukraine.

But it is applications like Telegram and TikTok, widely used by young Ukrainians, where much of this misinformation continues to proliferate.

TikTok told the BBC that it has “increased resources to respond to emerging trends and remove infringing content, including harmful misinformation and promotion of violence.” Telegram did not respond to our request for comment.

It is clear that what is happening online is causing even more panic and pain in the real world.

“We are scared by those who believe this false information,” Alina tells me, ready to head once more to the basement when the air raid siren sounds.