Soon after Russia invaded Ukraine, a newly-launched fact-checking service called War on Fakes published a piece claiming to debunk the notion that Ukrainians were not waging an information war against Russians.
Not only were Ukrainians spreading “fakes, productions, and misinformation” to depict Russian forces in “an unpleasant way,” the story said, but they were also using professional actors and video editing software to stage images of dead Russian soldiers and destroyed Ukrainian cities.
The information war would intensify, the purported fact-check predicted. Hollywood producers were gathering in Poland and would cross into Ukraine to create more misleading footage. Even American actor Sean Penn was participating in making the fakes, the story claimed, using the filming of a documentary about Ukraine as his cover.
War on Fakes claims to be a fact-checking service. “We dissect fakes and give links to rebuttals,” says its description on Telegram. Its website says that it aims to “provide unbiased information” to counter “an information war launched against Russia.”
But a review by PolitiFact shows that its “fact-checks” are actually pieces of disinformation that use well-known techniques of Russian propaganda — incoherence, a high volume of claims, repetition and the statement of obvious falsehoods— to confuse readers trying to understand what is happening in Ukraine.
War on Fakes employs a common strategy of Russian propaganda: It uses misleading information to produce...
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