Images of the pregnant young Ukrainian woman wounded in a Russian airstrike on a hospital in Mariupol earlier this month soon went viral. And news that the woman had later passed away spread like wildfire.
To counter the story, Russian mouthpieces worldwide began claiming that the woman was actually a paid actress and the images of her being carried on a gurney were staged. There was no airstrike, they claimed.
FakeReporter, an Israeli disinformation watchdog, says that no fewer than 20 posts by Russian embassies promoted the link on their official Twitter, Facebook and Telegram accounts, pushing out the story claiming to debunk what was labeled a Ukrainian hoax.
The link came from a news outlet called War on Fake, which the watchdog says is the latest weapon in Russia’s information warfare arsenal: a website that promotes Russian disinformation through the pretext of combating disinformation. The supposedly anti-fake news site, which was set up at the beginning of March, was the first to publish claims that denied the airstrike’s existence and said that so-called crisis actors were being employed by Ukraine.
The link, an analysis by FakeReporter reveals, was then spread throughout the internet, on both social media platforms and closed messaging services.
The War on Fake website maintains an extremely active presence on the Telegram messaging app that is popular in Russia: its main channel has over 18 million viewers and the link was posted there as well as to at least...
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