First came a one-minute video taken on the streets of Bucha, a Kyiv suburb abandoned by retreating Russian forces. The footage showed numerous bodies, civilians in winter coats, scattered along the muddy roads like leaves on a fall day.
Then came the deluge of misinformation: On social media, some argued the images were fake, that the bodies were actors pretending to be dead. Others falsely claimed the Ukrainian military had slain their own countrymen.
Stepaniuk fact-checks content for Facebook as part of her job at a think tank called VoxUkraine. After scouring credible news sources — such as a BBC article that said satellite imagery disproved Russian claims that the Bucha footage was staged — she and a handful of colleagues are compiling a report to debunk the misinformation flooding social media.
“It was hard to write about this, to see everything the first several times,” Stepaniuk said from her home in the Western city of Lutsk. “But now I understand I can’t ignore this. Everyone should see the photos and understand the scale of tragedy.”
Stepaniuk is part of a small group of independent fact-checkers in Ukraine who have long worked with Facebook to identify falsehoods on their social networks. When such outside groups determine a post is false, Facebook decreases its visibility in users’ news feeds and attaches a warning label pointing them to an explanation from the fact-checker.
The role of these fact-checkers has become more critical since Russia invaded Ukraine...
A front-page article with the byline of veteran New York Times opinion writer Nicholas Kristof is the latest poisonous example of what I call the NGO “halo effect.” Headlined “The Silence That Mee...