TikTok Directs Users to “Misinformation” About Ukraine Border Skirmish, Researchers Find

It’s just amazing that we allow a literal “Ministry of Truth” to operate in this country.

This really happened:

In the last 12 hours, all of the post-taping videos from the Ukraine were deleted from Twitter. I’m sure those are classified as “misinformation.”

At the same time, the Ghost of Kiev, Snake Island, Grannies with Guns, and all of the other confirmed hoaxes are allowed to flourish.

We are at the point where these people have literally proclaimed themselves the arbiters of reality itself.

The Guardian:

A new TikTok account can be shown falsehoods about the Ukraine war within minutes of signing up to the app, according to an investigation by anti-misinformation outlet NewsGuard.

The company, which monitors the trustworthiness of news outlets across the web, ran a pair of tests to assess how the video-sharing app treated information about the conflict. It found that a new account that did nothing but scroll the app’s algorithmically curated For You Page watching videos about the war would be funnelled towards false or misleading content within 40 minutes.

“Toward the end of the 45–minute experiment, analysts’ feeds were almost exclusively populated with both accurate and false content related to the war in Ukraine – with no distinction made between disinformation and reliable sources,” the research team wrote.

“At a time when false narratives about the Russia-Ukraine conflict are proliferating online, none of the videos fed to our analysts by TikTok’s algorithm contained any information about the trustworthiness of the source, warnings, fact-checks, or additional information that could empower users with reliable information.”

Among the false claims shown to the researchers was the myth that the US has bioweapon laboratories in Ukraine, and the accusation that Putin was “photoshopped” on to footage of a press conference he gave in early March. Videos also claimed that fake footage was real, and that real footage was fake: videos purportedly of the “Ghost of Kyiv” shooting down Russian jets were taken from a video game, while real videos from the war were decried as fake by pro-Russian accounts.

“Some of the myths in the videos TikTok’s algorithm fed to analysts have previously been identified as Kremlin propaganda,” the researchers said, by the organisation’s Russia-Ukraine Disinformation Tracking Center.

A lot of the hoaxes are not as cut and dry as the Ghost of Kiev to a normal person.

But they are still stupid hoaxes, which can be confirmed as hoaxes. For example, the recent hoax of a “Russian bombing of a peaceful shopping mall” has been totally, absolutely debunked.

But I guarantee you – videos exposing this are marked as “disinformation” by the “fact checkers.”

They do definitely check for facts – then when they find facts, they mark them as “disinformation” and ban them.

Related:

We’ve always heard “the truth is the first casualty of war,” but the media has taken this Ukraine hoax into a whole new realm.

The only reason this degree of lying is possible is that over two years, the entire population was trained, through aggressive behavioral modification, to accept whatever the media/government said as fact.

If they didn’t accept it, they were punished. People broke.

Now, all of the dumbest conceivable lies are possible.