![]() ![]() There’s no way for Russia to come out on top economically, militarily, or diplomatically. The same rules apply on social media as apply on any other source of news: Beware of finding any report that is too friendly to your own deeply held hopes.Ĭan Russia win the war in Ukraine? No. To be fair, numerous people have had serious concerns about this account for months (believe me, I have your emails on the subject), but the relentlessly upbeat, pro-Ukraine, victory-is-right-around-the-corner chatter from this account made it hard to resist for many people, especially among the sea of doom-and-gloom posts. It certainly didn’t help that they posted a picture of their rifle that turned out to be an air soft gun. This week, one of the most-followed pro-Ukrainian accounts was deleted after the account, which supposedly represented the on-line face of several volunteers serving on the front lines of the war, was definitively revealed as a fake. Some of these accounts have tens of thousands of followers, all eager to sign on and give a big cheer for Vladimir Putin.īut it’s not just pro-Russian propaganda blurring the picture. right wing, as well as right-wing accounts from Brazil to Hungary, seems to be regularly “explaining” how Ukraine is corrupt, the war was started by Joe Biden, and they’re excited to announce that Russia is win-win-winning. It’s debatable whether Russia even needs these one-note accounts, since more than half the U.S. At the start of the war, Twitter made a concerted effort to purge Russian bot accounts, but any dip in those accounts was purely temporary (India seems to be the current server location of choice). MSNBC also has a single Ukraine-related story, that one an interview with a former Zelenskyy advisor.Īnyone seeking an answer to “yes, but, what’s actually happening in Ukraine?” is forced back to the one place that it seems holds all answers these days: social media, where actual news has to be sifted from tens of thousands of propaganda accounts. CNN also features a single story about the invasion of Ukraine, one that focuses on volunteers, but to its credit, does describe the general situation in eastern Ukraine and Russia’s goals in the area. There are actually more mentions of the war in the sports section, where Russia is both continuing to hold American basketball star Brittney Griner and preventing a Russian hockey player from moving to the U.S. weapons than to any current action on the ground. Today’s New York Times contains a single news story on the invasion of Ukraine, and that one is more related to the sale of U.S. With the Russian invasion of Ukraine, most of the major media seems to be providing … not very much, really, especially when it comes to answering questions about the tactical or strategic progress of the war. In both cases, the action reports the public was receiving were heavily filtered and optimistic, but they at least gave a sense of how things were moving. Over the course of more than a decade in Vietnam, Americans got used to the bizarre nightly ritual of the official body counts, magazines loaded with searing photographs, and reporters bringing news footage showing a war that never seemed far from chaos. During World War II, the folks back home could read about the progress of the conflict in daily papers, listen to the voices of journalists in Europe or the Pacific coming to them over the radio in the evening, and visit the local movie theater for a glimpse of the action on the latest newsreel.
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