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San Francisco (AFP) – Twitter will put warnings on tweets that share links to media affiliated with the Russian state, the platform announced on Monday, as Kremlin-linked media outlets are accused of spreading disinformation about Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
Pressure is on social media giants to remove misleading or false information about the attack, which has drawn fierce international condemnation.
Kremlin-affiliated outlets RT and Sputnik have faced accusations of using false narratives in an effort to justify the war.
Twitter Integrity Leader Yoel Roth wrote that the platform has seen more than 45,000 daily tweets sharing links from media affiliated with the Russian state.
“Our product should make it easier to understand who is behind the content you see, and what their motivations and intentions are,” he added.
In addition to adding tags that identify the source of links, Roth said the platform is also “taking significant steps to reduce the circulation of this type of content on Twitter.”
The announcement comes a day after Facebook parent company Meta said pro-Russian groups were orchestrating disinformation campaigns on social media, using fake profiles or hacking accounts to paint Ukraine as a weak pawn of Western ambiguity.
The cybersecurity team of the tech giant, which also owns Instagram, reported that it blocked a series of fake accounts linked to Russia that were part of a plot to undermine Ukraine.
The small network of accounts, both on Facebook and Instagram, targeted people in Ukraine, using posts to try to get them to visit websites with fake news about the country’s effort to defend itself from the Russian invasion.
Twitter and Facebook have been hit with access restrictions in Russia since the invasion and are currently “largely unusable,” the web monitoring group NetBlocks reported.
Social networks have become one of the fronts in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, not only as a stage for misinformation but also for real-time monitoring of the rapid development of this conflict that marks the biggest geopolitical crisis in Europe in decades.
© 2022 AFP
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