It has been more than three weeks since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine, and disinformation about the conflict has proliferated on social media.
Many Taiwanese, projecting their own concerns about war, are avidly following the events, forwarding or posting reports that comply with their own understanding of the situation and support the side for which they are most sympathetic.
In many cases, they are doing so without fact-checking the reports, in a step backward for media literacy, which had made such strides in the past few years thanks to awareness initiatives.
The spread of disinformation during war is nothing new. The rise of mass communication studies was partly due to the desire to understand how Nazi propaganda before World War II was so effective and how to counteract it.
In the second half of the 19th century, two rival newspaper tycoons, William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, made huge profits selling newspapers sensationalizing the Spanish-American War and nationalism, showing that the media can be part of the war machine and a benefactor of conflict.
The war in Ukraine has forced Western media to choose sides — picking from along the so-called pro-democratic camp, which is a legacy of the Cold War, while Russia, for its part, has always been ahead of the game when it comes to information warfare. Both sides have the motivation and the means to spread disinformation, making propaganda around this war more important than in previous conflicts.
However, it takes more than just motivation and means to ensure the viral spread of disinformation.
During World War II, propaganda tools were traditional mass media channels such as movies, radio and newspapers, essentially means for one-way communication from those with access to the wider public.
Propaganda tools in the social media era operate differently. They consist of various nodes within a network connected and distributed horizontally, with individual receivers of information completing the dissemination process by forwarding it to other nodes. In this model, it is crucial that receivers of information are able to differentiate between fact and rumor.
During war, facts are often compromised, and disseminating disinformation that benefits one side becomes an obligation to its supporters, while fact-checking becomes the enemy. If this mindset becomes normalized, how long would it take to return to the path of pursuing facts once the war is over? There might be no turning back.
War should not be a reason for news organizations and social media users to compromise the authenticity of information. The news media have their own ideological stances that influence their production process, including what they choose to publish and what narratives they espouse.
The most trusted news sources are those that do not allow their ideological stance to get in the way of the facts. This is a lesson learned along the way in the development of journalism.
In the era of social media, every user plays a role in the communication process, and so each person should regard themselves as an information communicator. We should not allow our ideological stances to affect our judgement of the facts, nor filter out information as fact or fiction depending on our own biases.
War makes people emotional, but that does not mean we should abandon our commitment to the truth.
Chang Yueh-han is an adjunct assistant professor in Shih Hsin University’s department of journalism.
Translated by Lin Lee-kai
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