Three weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine last Feb. 24, a video appeared on a Ukrainian news site that seemed to show President Volodymyr Zelensky imploring his fellow countrymen to stop fighting and urging soldiers to lay down their weapons.
“There is no need to die in this war,” he seemed to say in the video, which was widely circulated on social media and appeared briefly on Ukrainian television with a news ticker suggesting that he had fled the country. “I advise you to live.”
The video—a crude deepfake that had been posted by hackers—was quickly taken down and debunked. It was dismissed by the real Zelensky as a “childish provocation,” and roundly mocked online as an example of Russia’s desperate and often cartoonish attempts to spread fake news. But researchers say the deepfake is just one example of a barrage of disinformation, manipulated imagery, forged documents, and targeted propaganda unleashed by Russia and pro-Kremlin activists that may have had a significant impact on audiences over the last year of war.
“Changing people’s minds and positions is much harder than simply sowing doubt or fear,” says Andy Carvin, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, which has tracked Russian hybrid warfare activities since 2015 and on Wednesday released a pair of reports analyzing the Kremlin’s information warfare before and after the invasion. “It’s one of the reasons why Kremlin information operations focus so much on essentially generating...
This story is the second in an ongoing series on the Cost of Fraud, as Open the Books tallies the hidden fees on American tax returns. Click here to read the first story on fraudulent autism billi...