News from Ukraine is blown to pieces on social media

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On Thursday morning, long before I loaded the first of many articles about the Russian attack on Ukraine, I received this news on my phone. Twitter establish event filled with tweets from news agencies and government officials, such as Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, who tweeted, “For all those who have not lost their conscience in Russia, it’s time to go out and protest war with Ukraine.” A friend in the group chat captured a picture on his TV showing a cable news image of cars leaving Kyiv. Notifications from other platforms soon followed. Information about Ukraine has taken over my home screen.

Of course, this is how most people get their news now: broken down, piecing together tidbits from multiple places and platforms. But there’s also something else going on. People started posting information from different sources. Medusa Editor Kevin Rothrock posted a screenshot from Flightradar24 shows air traffic — or, in this case, lack of air traffic — over Ukraine and Belarus with the caption “Negative space of war”. (The site saw a spike in traffic. “In the space of a few hours, we went from 3 million users per day to 1 million users per hour,” said spokesman Ian Petchenik.) Professor Jeffrey Lewis of the Middlebury Institute said. tweeted screenshot from Google Maps showing “traffic jam” on the road from Belgorod, Russia, to the Ukraine border occurred around the time Russian President Vladimir Putin announced “special military operation”. Even Times join the action, post security camera footage on Twitter showed Russian troops entering the area from Crimea.

This ubiquity of media isn’t new, but there’s something fascinating about learning about events around the world in this way, almost as if social media has trained the brain. our own to gather our own sources. Let’s say what you’re going to say about short attention spans in the internet age, there’s some benefit to being rewinded to gather intelligence from multiple sources to understand what’s going on.

However, there are downsides too – the worst part is that not everything that ends up on the internet is right. Not every TikTok actually claims to be a live stream from Ukraine. The Russian government is a disinformation machine. Sometimes messages from officials don’t tell the whole story; sometimes tweets from eyewitnesses too. Misinformation is an epidemic on the Internet, but in some cases, social media can be the fastest way to disseminate stories from the ground up.

Putting together the pieces of an ongoing situation is what the Internet often does, though not always, well. When the situation in Ukraine initially unfolded, there was a controversial fight about it among Wikipedia editors. In a way, this is how it should be. The truth about what is happening in Ukraine right now will continue to be revealed for a long time. People should consult as many sources as possible. (They should also verify what they see before sharing it in a rush.) To speak journalism is the first manuscript of history. Surname To speak History is written by the winners. But maybe that’s only part of the story. Perhaps history is written in ether — it’s up to us to make sure we’re paying attention.

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